Can macOS system open zip and tar archives natively?

I have to upload an archive for some Linux, Windows and Mac OS users. I'm using Linux so I'm sure everybody could handle a tar file, Windows users will get some problems, so I think zip is the best way.

Are these formats native?

Solution 1:

OS X can handle both by default from Finder. The Archive Utility that ships with OS X knows how to extract both formats. Just double click on the file or Cmd-Click (or right click) on the archive and select 'Open' from the list and OS X will unarchive it.

Users also have access to zip, unzip and tar from a Terminal window command line. These all come with OS X.

There's also the free, and most excellent, Unarchiver that they can install that allows for a few more options when dealing with compressed files. It also supports a few more formats. But it's completely unnecessary for extracting gzip-compressed tar archives and zip archives.