Sample TAR archives for testing, free, CC0 and hotlinkable
Tar is the archive format of the Unix world, and unlike zip it has no central directory: a reader walks the file from the beginning, one header at a time. That difference shows up as soon as something has to seek, stream or truncate.
tar/3-text-files.tar is three small Lorem Ipsum text files uncompressed, every entry owned by
uid 0 with a fixed timestamp. The same three files are published compressed two ways:
tar/3-text-files.tar.gz, the .tar.gz most tooling means when it says "a tarball", and
tar/3-text-files.tar.xz for the smaller, slower option.
Fixed ownership and timestamps are the reason these are useful as fixtures. A tar built on your machine embeds your user, your group and the moment you built it; these embed none of that, so the checksum is stable and the archive reveals nothing about where it came from.
Use them to test extraction, streaming readers and build caches. Related formats: ZIP, GZIP and 7z.
| File | Size | Properties | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
3-text-files.tar
|
10.2 KB (10,240 bytes) | Three small Lorem Ipsum text files in an uncompressed tar, every entry owned by uid 0 with a fixed timestamp.
Snippets |
|
3-text-files.tar.gz
|
1.2 KB (1,152 bytes) | The same three text files, gzip-compressed: the .tar.gz that most tooling means by 'a tarball'.
Snippets |
|
3-text-files.tar.xz
|
1.3 KB (1,268 bytes) | The same three text files, xz-compressed.
Snippets |
Every TAR file in one command, each checked against its hash: npx loremfile get --format tar, or loremfile get --format tar after pip install loremfile.
Related formats
File names follow the naming grammar. Verify a download against sha256sums.txt.