tar2 🗜️

A production-ready, feature-rich tar replacement with tree view, full color support (hex + named), emoji file icons, and a smart cross-platform config system.

Binary name: tar2 — drop-in compatible with standard tar CLI flags.
Author: Hadi Cahyadi cumulus13@gmail.com
Homepage: https://github.com/cumulus13/tar2

✨ Features

🚀 Quick Start

# Create a gzip archive
tar2 -czf archive.tar.gz src/ docs/

# Extract to a directory
tar2 -xzf archive.tar.gz -C /tmp/out/

# List contents (with verbose metadata)
tar2 -tvf archive.tar.gz

# Show as a tree (unlimited depth)
tar2 tree archive.tar.gz

# Show tree, 2 levels deep, with sizes and dates
tar2 tree archive.tar.gz -d 2 --size --time

# Include only .rs files
tar2 -tf archive.tar.gz --include '*.rs'

# Exclude build artifacts
tar2 -czf project.tar.gz . --exclude 'target/**' --exclude '*.o'

# Verify integrity
tar2 -Wf archive.tar.gz

🌲 Tree View

tar2 tree myproject.tar.gz -d 3 --size --time --perm

📦 Tree: myproject.tar.gz
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
├── 💻 Cargo.toml  -rw-r--r--  1.2 KiB  2024-11-01 14:30
├── 📁 src  drwxr-xr-x  2024-11-01 14:30
│   ├── 💻 main.rs  -rw-r--r--  8.4 KiB  2024-11-01 14:30
│   └── 📁 modules  drwxr-xr-x  2024-11-01 14:30
│       ├── 💻 archive.rs  -rw-r--r--  12.1 KiB  2024-11-01 14:29
│       └── 💻 config.rs  -rw-r--r--  6.8 KiB  2024-11-01 14:28
└── 📁 docs  drwxr-xr-x  2024-11-01 14:30
    └── 📝 README.md  -rw-r--r--  4.2 KiB  2024-11-01 14:27
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Total: 8 entries total

Use --ascii for ASCII art connectors (|-- / `--) instead of Unicode box-drawing.

⚙️ Configuration

Config file search order

tar searches for config in this order (first found wins):

Linux:

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tar/tar.toml
2. ~/.config/tar/tar.toml
3. ~/tar.toml / ~/.tar.toml
4. /etc/tar/tar.toml
5. Current working directory
6. Same directory as the executable

macOS:

1. ~/Library/Application Support/tar/tar.toml
2. ~/.config/tar/tar.toml
3. ~/tar.toml / ~/.tar.toml
4. Current working directory / exe directory

Windows:

1. %APPDATA%\tar\tar.toml
2. %USERPROFILE%\tar.toml
3. Current working directory / exe directory

Both .toml and .json formats are supported, with and without a leading dot.

Config commands

tar2 config list              # Show all keys and current values
tar2 config get colors.dir    # Get a single value
tar2 config set colors.dir '#FF6600'   # Set a value (saves immediately)
tar2 config set display.emoji false    # Disable emoji
tar2 config paths             # Show all searched paths
tar2 config which             # Show active config file
tar2 config reset             # Reset to defaults
tar2 config edit              # Open config in $EDITOR

Full config reference

[colors]
dir    = "#00BFFF"    # Directory entries
file   = "white"      # Regular files
link   = "#FF69B4"    # Symlinks
exec   = "#00FF7F"    # Executables
header = "#FFD700"    # Archive name / headers
size   = "#00FFFF"    # File sizes
date   = "#DDA0DD"    # Modification times
perm   = "#FFA500"    # Permission strings
tree   = "#808080"    # Tree branch characters
warn   = "#FFFF00"    # Warnings
error  = "#FF4444"    # Errors
ok     = "#44FF44"    # Success messages

[emojis]
dir     = "📁"
file    = "📄"
link    = "🔗"
archive = "📦"
image   = "🖼️"
video   = "🎬"
audio   = "🎵"
doc     = "📝"
code    = "💻"
ok      = "✅"
warn    = "⚠️"
error   = "❌"

[display]
emoji           = true         # Show emoji icons
colors          = true         # Enable colored output
tree_depth      = 0            # Default tree depth (0 = unlimited)
human_readable  = true         # Human-readable sizes (KiB, MiB...)
verbose         = false        # Verbose by default
progress_style  = "bar"        # "bar" | "spinner" | "none"
date_format     = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"
tree_style      = "unicode"    # "unicode" | "ascii"

Colors accept:

• Hex: #RRGGBB (e.g. #00FFFF, #FF6600)
• Named: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, and bright_* variants

🎯 Flag Reference

Operations

Compression

Compression is auto-detected from the archive filename if no flag is given.

Filtering

🙈 Ignore files

tar2 understands .gitignore-style pattern files and applies them automatically as extra exclusion rules — for create/pack (-c), extract (-x), list (-t), append/update (-r/-u), and the tree subcommand.

On each run, tar2 looks directly inside the current directory (and, for -c/-r/-u, inside each source directory) for any of the following, in priority order, and loads every one it finds:

.tar2ignore  .tarignore  .gitignore  .dockerignore  .npmignore  .hgignore  .ignore

All of them use the same pattern syntax as .gitignore — including # comments, !negation, and dir/-only rules. When one or more is found, tar2 prints which files it used:

Using ignore rules from: /path/to/.gitignore, /path/to/.dockerignore

To turn this off entirely, pass --no-auto-ignore. To load extra patterns from a file that isn't one of the standard names, pass --ignore-file path/to/file (repeatable). Ignore rules combine with --exclude/--include — an ignored path is dropped regardless of other filters.

# Pack a project dir, respecting its .gitignore/.dockerignore automatically
tar -czf project.tar.gz project/

# Ignore rules also apply when listing or extracting
tar -tf project.tar.gz
tar -xf project.tar.gz -C /tmp/out

# Use a one-off ignore file instead of auto-detected ones
tar -czf project.tar.gz --no-auto-ignore --ignore-file .buildignore project/

Other options

📦 Prebuilt Binaries

Every tagged release publishes binaries for a broad platform matrix — see the Releases page. Filenames follow tar2_<version>_<platform>:

Verify a download against the release's checksums.txt with sha256sum -c.

🔨 Building

git clone https://github.com/cumulus13/tar2
cd tar2
cargo build --release
# Binary at: target/release/tar2

Requirements: Rust 1.75+

Install globally:

cargo install --path .
# or
cp target/release/tar2 ~/.local/bin/tar2

🌍 Environment Variables

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE

👤 Author

Hadi Cahyadi

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