ttar

ttar c archive.tar files...ttar x archive.tar

ttar (tiny tar) is a minimal tar archiver written in freestanding C. It uses only raw system calls, with no libc, no external libraries, and no other dependencies, producing a very small static binary (about 2.4 KB on arm64). It targets multiple architectures including arm64, arm-v7, mips, riscv, x86, and i386.The tool supports just two operations: creating an uncompressed tar archive from a list of files, and extracting an existing tar archive. It is aimed at minimal, embedded, or bootstrap environments where a full tar implementation is unavailable or too large.

c archive.tar files...

Create archive.tar containing the listed files.

Extract the contents of archive.tar into the current directory.

The mode must be a single c or x as the first argument; any other value exits with an error. ttar does not compress archives and does not provide listing, appending, or filtering options found in full tar implementations. Use a dedicated compressor such as gzip on the resulting archive if compression is needed.

ttar was released as a demonstration of a libc-free, syscall-only archiver in pure C, emphasizing an extremely small binary footprint. It is distributed under the GPL-3.0 license.

tar(1), cpio(1), pax(1), ar(1), gzip(1)

Source code