Sample TAR Files — Download Uncompressed Tarball Test Archives
Tape archive (uncompressed) · .tar · MIME type application/x-tar
Download a sample TAR file — a plain, uncompressed tarball of real files from this site. TAR bundles files without compressing them, which is why it is almost always paired with gzip, bzip2 or xz; a bare .tar is what Docker image layers, backups and Unix tooling pass around internally.
Use it to confirm your extractor handles uncompressed tar (some libraries assume .tar.gz), preserves directory structure, and reports the correct entry count.
Download sample TAR files
| File | Details | Size | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
sample-archive-small.tar | 7 entries | 819 KB | |
sample-archive-medium.tar | 5 entries | 3.0 MB |
Use these files from the command line or CI
Every URL is stable and CORS-open. Pin the SHA-256 in your test and you will know the moment a fixture changes.
# Download one file curl -O https://pnb-website-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/samples/archives/tar/sample-archive-small.tar # Verify it (SHA-256 is listed for every file above) shasum -a 256 sample-archive-small.tar # Machine-readable index of every sample file curl https://pnb-website-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/samples/index.json | jq '.files[] | select(.format=="tar")'
TAR format at a glance
| Full name | Tape archive (uncompressed) |
|---|---|
| Extensions | .tar |
| MIME type | application/x-tar |
| Format | POSIX ustar / PAX |
| Compression | None |
| Structure | pine-birch-samples/ prefix, relative paths only |
| Magic bytes | 'ustar' at offset 257 |
What people test with sample TAR files
- Unix backup and deployment tooling
- Docker and container-layer handling
- Extractor support for uncompressed tar
Frequently asked questions
Why is the .tar bigger than the files it contains?
Each entry has a 512-byte header and is padded to a 512-byte boundary, and the archive ends with two zero blocks. With no compression, a tarball is always slightly larger than its contents.
Are these TAR files safe to download?
Yes. Every file is generated by our own open script from scratch — nothing is scraped or user-uploaded — and contains no scripts, macros or executables. The SHA-256 of each file is published on this page so you can verify what you received.
Can I use the sample TAR files commercially?
Yes. They are free for any purpose, including commercial products, test suites, demos and redistribution, with no attribution required. There is nothing to license and no one to ask.
Can I hotlink these files or use them in CI?
Yes. Every link is a stable direct URL over HTTPS with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * and long cache headers, so curl, wget, fetch() and test runners can pull them directly. A JSON index of every file is linked from each page (see the command-line section).
Related sample files
Testing a file pipeline? We build them.
Uploads, conversions, previews, document processing and media workflows are the kind of production systems Pine & Birch designs and runs for clients — which is why we needed these files in the first place.
See how we can help