Tar and Curl on Windows 10

Today Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17063 which includes a lot of great new features like Timeline, Activities, Microsoft Edge, Windows Subsystem for Linux improvements and much more. But Microsoft also included something for IT Pros and Developers. After the OpenSSH client and the OpenSSH server. Microsoft brings two new command-line tools for the Windows toolchain: curl and bsdtar. These tools are very well known tools in the open source world. Including them in Windows should make Windows even a better development platform.

Tar: A command line tool that allows a user to extract files and create archives. Outside of PowerShell or the installation of third party software, there was no way to extract a file from cmd.exe. We’re correcting this behavior 🙂 The implementation we’re shipping in Windows uses libarchive.

Curl: Another command line tool that allows for transferring of files to and from servers (so you can, say, now download a file from the internet).

Why this, so first of all you have PowerShell which has similar functionality, but PowerShell is not always available (Think about Nano Server container images where you have not the Full .Net Framework available). Secondly Developers which come from other operating systems are already familiar with these tools and they can use, as they would on their “old” operating system.

If you want to know more, check out Craig Wihite’s (Microsoft) blog post: Tar and Curl Come to Windows!

As mentioned this is included in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17063 and should ship to production customers in the next Windows 10 release, which might be Windows 10 (1803).