GUI Tar is a wrapper application which acts as the front end to the 7za, tar, gzip, bzip2, un/compress, 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.