How to Extract .tar.gz on Windows 11 Without 7-Zip — and Fix "Invalid empty pathname" (Tested)

What .tar, .tar.gz and .tgz actually are

A .tar joins many files and folders into one file without compressing them. A .tar.gz (also written .tgz) is that tar compressed with gzip; .tar.bz2, .tar.xz and .tar.zst use bzip2, xz and zstd instead. I packed a test folder (4 files, 301,816 bytes, Korean file names) with Windows' own tar and read the first bytes of each result:

The plain .tar was slightly *larger* than the source - it only packs. The compressed sizes barely moved here because 300,000 of the bytes were random data; folders of text and documents shrink much more.

Way 1: File Explorer (Windows 11 24H2 and later)

1. 1Right-click the .tar.gz (or .tar, .tgz, .tar.xz…).
2. 2Choose Extract All…, pick a destination, and extract.

Microsoft's support page "Zip and unzip files" states that Windows 11, version 24H2 supports ZIP, RAR, 7z and TAR, and that it does not support operations on encrypted archives. On this PC (Windows 11 build 26300) all six variants above opened as compressed folders, and extracting the .tar.gz through Explorer gave back all 4 files with their Korean names intact.

Way 2: tar -xf (any Windows 10 or 11)

Windows has shipped tar since Windows 10 Insider build 17063 (Microsoft's command-line blog, January 2018). On this PC, C:\Windows\System32\tar.exe reported bsdtar 3.8.9 - libarchive 3.8.9. Open Command Prompt or PowerShell in the folder with the archive:

tar -xf archive.tar.gz

To extract somewhere else, add -C and a folder. The folder has to exist - pointing at a missing one failed with tar.exe: could not chdir to '…'.

tar -xf archive.tar.gz -C C:\Users\you\Desktop\unpacked

To look inside first, use -t instead of -x:

tar -tf archive.tar.gz

You don't need -z, -j or -J when extracting: the same -xf extracted all six variants. It even extracted a .zip I had renamed to .tar, so it goes by the file's content, not its extension. The same tar.exe also reads RAR and 7z archives (there's a separate guide on that here).

"Invalid empty pathname": tar files made on Linux

GNU tar on Linux writes file names as raw UTF-8 bytes in its default format. I built such an archive with Python's tarfile (GNU format, UTF-8 names, no PAX headers) and extracted it with Windows' tar on this PC. Every entry failed and nothing was extracted (exit code 1):

> tar -xf linux_gnu.tar -C out
?먮즺/: Invalid empty pathname: Unknown error
?먮즺/readme.txt: Invalid empty pathname: Unknown error
?먮즺/蹂닿퀬??理쒖쥌.txt: Invalid empty pathname: Unknown error
...

The names are UTF-8 read as the PC's legacy code page. Telling libarchive which character set the headers use fixed it - all 4 files came out with their original names:

tar --options hdrcharset=UTF-8 -xf linux_gnu.tar -C out

• libarchive's archive_read_set_options(3) lists hdrcharset for the tar reader: "The value is used as a character set name that will be used when translating file names."
• File Explorer's Extract All extracted the same archive with correct names (2.8 seconds here), with no options.
• tar -tf on that archive printed the same garbled names with exit 0 - a quick way to spot the problem before extracting.
• Archives made by Windows' tar and PAX-format archives extracted fine without the option. Windows' tar wrote a PAX header for the non-ASCII names (the file starts with PaxHea).

Other errors I hit

If Git for Windows is installed, typing tar inside Git Bash runs Git's GNU tar 1.35 (C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\tar.exe), not Windows' bsdtar. That one extracted the Linux-style archive without any option.

FAQ