[AccessD] Archiving with Tar and VBA

[Gustav Brock]

Hi all

I wasn't aware, that the old Unix archiving and compress tool tar also comes with Windows since Windows 10, and that Windows Explorer in Windows 11 also will open these archives.
This means, that Windows 11 can handle tar, tgz, and tar.gz files natively, at least from the command line.

Also, tar can extract zip files created with Windows Explorer. This means that zip folders created by normal Windows users can be unzipped from the command line without using PowerShell or any third-party tools.

So, I have supplemented my article series about zipping, compressing, etc. with VBA using native Windows tools already covering zip and cabinet files with a third article about archiving with tar:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/35655/Handle-Archive-Files-and-Folders-With-VBA-the-Windows-Explorer-Way.html?preview=546Zf6%2BK49U%3D

Complete code is on GitHub:

https://github.com/GustavBrock/VBA.Compress.git

A special feature of tar is that in can archive a bunch of files as one file without compression. This is a useful and extremely fast method to collect video and image files already highly compressed.

/gustav