tar
. No need to involve Cygwin, either; it can run as a native program. The UnxUtils project on Sourceforge has lots of Windows versions of common Unix utilities without the need for Cygwin.gunzip
into tar
in order to unpack a tarball without using lots of extra disk space. But a GUI is going to offer a list of all the files in the archive, which you can't do without reading the entire tar file. A GUI will also allow you to point and click to select which single files to extract, and you can't do that without reading the entire file, either.