GUI Tar is a wrapper application which acts as the front end to the 7za, tar, gzip, bzip2, uncompress, unrar, unzip, and zip UNIX utilities. The operating system itself handles the complicated work, while GUI Tar provides a pleasant and easy method to interact with these system tools. GUI Tar is divided into two sections: Extractor and Compressor.

GUI Tar Extractor offers the functionality to uncompress and extract files from archives. The following files can be opened by Extractor: .7z, .tar, .tgz, .tar.gz, .dmg.gz, .svgz, .gz, .tar.z, .z, .Z, .tar.Z, .taz, .tbz, .tbz2, .bz, .bz2, .rar, and .zip.

GUI Tar Compressor can compress and/or archive a collection of files in .7z, .bz2, .tar, .tbz, .tgz, .gz, .Z, or .zip formats. Archive files and folders from multiple locations, instead of being restricted to just one directory.