Sample TAR files
Free TAR test files from 5 KB to 1 GB. Pick a size and download, or type any size you need.
5 KB TAR
3 files inside
10 KB TAR
3 files inside
100 KB TAR
3 files inside
500 KB TAR
3 files inside
1 MB TAR
3 files inside
5 MB TAR
Made on your device
10 MB TAR
Made on your device
25 MB TAR
Made on your device
50 MB TAR
Made on your device · saved in pieces
100 MB TAR
Made on your device · saved in pieces
500 MB TAR
Made on your device · saved in pieces
1 GB TAR
Made on your device · saved in pieces
Free for any use, including commercial. Made by this site, with no third-party content and no signup.
What is inside
- readme.txt, employees.csv and data.bin, as in the ZIP samples
- POSIX ustar headers, the format GNU tar, bsdtar and 7-Zip all read
- No compression at all: the archive is the files plus their headers
- Each archive ends on a 512-byte block boundary, a little under its label
- Fixed dates and owner names, so the checksums stay the same
Try it with these tools
They run in your browser. The file you downloaded stays on your device.
- TAR Extractor Open a .tar or .tar.gz and extract what is inside.
- TAR Creator Bundle files into a .tar or .tar.gz archive.
- Archive Viewer Look inside a ZIP, TAR, GZ, RAR or 7z without extracting it.
- GZIP Compressor Compress a single file with gzip.
- tar Command Generator Build a tar command to create, list or extract an archive.
- File Hash Generator Work out the MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 of a file without uploading it.
About TAR files
TAR, short for tape archive, comes from Unix in the late 1970s. It joins many files into one stream along with their names, permissions and dates. It does not compress anything; that job is left to gzip, bzip2 or xz, which is where .tar.gz and .tar.xz come from.
Linux and macOS use tar for software source, backups and Docker image layers. Windows 10 and 11 also ship a tar command, so a .tar opens on most computers without extra software.
Everything in a tar is laid out in 512-byte blocks, and the archive ends with two empty blocks. A file cut off during download often still lists fine but fails on the last entry, so checking the size or checksum first saves time.
Sources: pax and the ustar format, POSIX (The Open Group) · Basic tar format, GNU tar manual (GNU) · Tar file format family (Library of Congress)
Questions
Why is the TAR not exactly 10 KB or 1 MB?
A tar archive is built from 512-byte blocks, so its size is always a multiple of 512. Each sample stops on the last whole block under its label.
How do I make it a .tar.gz?
Run gzip on it, or use the GZIP Compressor on this site. Because data.bin is random, the .tar.gz will be nearly as large as the .tar.
What command extracts it?
tar -xf sample-1mb.tar on Linux, macOS or Windows 10 and later. To list the contents without extracting, use tar -tvf.
Also searched as: sample tar file download, dummy tar file, test tar file, example tar file, 1 MB tar file, 10 MB tar file, 100 MB tar file, 1 GB tar file, free tar for testing.
For developers: exact bytes and SHA-256
Sizes are decimal (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes). The hosted files never change between builds, so these checksums stay valid.
| File | Bytes | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|
| sample-5kb.tar | 4,608 bytes | 41ca6c5257ede4319859e405056d35fbd7fb981f6d19a2520f718416a7b4f775 |
| sample-10kb.tar | 9,728 bytes | d952661b25e94c9e532151665309324491bbdbb032bc596a3834414ee649d933 |
| sample-100kb.tar | 99,840 bytes | 76287fe712763b3b61d7a65c435a5b7641de268d80e1a424072477469bec3e7b |
| sample-500kb.tar | 499,712 bytes | 2aa424897fc7ca17d37fbd63eb3ffbb9613153a521763edb255cca3ec1ca044a |
| sample-1mb.tar | 999,936 bytes | 945d191591193eaaa67b66047e681cd781d1629ebeda7954aa13e598b9f8224c |