“Best?” I don’t know for sure. “Free,” yup. Users of Windows 7 have a sticky time opening tarball files or tar.gz packages that are often provided for coding purposes and more advanced computing than Windows users are given credit for wanting to attempt. Well I wanted to and it seemed that all the unzip, unpack software leads to cost. Well…
As I encroach some python scripting for fun, a book I’m reading, Visualize This, requires that one of the next steps I perform is to, “download Beautiful Soup, … Save the Beautiful Soup Python (.py) file in the directory that you plan to save your code in.” Two lines! It sounds so easy! After a half hour I was beyond annoyed.
So enter a programmer friend’s knowledge of 7-Zip It’s a free way to open and manage and do even more with tar.gz files for Windows. Getting it’s a breeze and once got and .exe installed with some choices to make that might give newer users pause, 7-Zip provides all manner of right-click Context Menu help for future packaged files like Beautiful Soup.
Matter of fact, it always appears in the Context Menu after it’s installed leading me to believe that it’s far more powerful than I originally thought. So, free and easy tar.gz unpack program is best enough for me.
