untar(tarfile, files = NULL, list = FALSE, exdir = ".", compressed = NA, extras = NULL, verbose = FALSE, restore_times =  TRUE, tar = Sys.getenv("TAR"))path.expand) will be performed.  Alternatively, a
    connection that can be used for binary reads.TRUE, list the files (the equivalent of
    tar -tf).  Otherwise extract the files (the equivalent of
    tar -xf).tar -C).  It will be created if necessary."gzip",
    "bzip2" and "xz" select that form of compression (and
    may be abbreviated to the first letter).  TRUE indicates gzip
    compression, FALSE no known compression (but an external
    tar command may detect compression automagically), and
    NA (the default) that the type is inferred from the file
    header.NULL or a character string: further command-line
    flags such as -p to be passed to an external tar
    program.tar can also contain flags separated from the command by spaces.list = TRUE, a character vector of (relative or absolute)
  paths of files contained in the tar archive.Otherwise the return code from system, invisibly.
tar command or for an
  internal implementation written in R.  The latter is used if
  tarfile is a connection or if the argument tar is
  "internal" or "" (except on Windows, when
  tar.exe is tried first).  What options are supported will depend on the tar used.
  Modern GNU flavours of tar will support compressed archives,
  and since 1.15 are able to detect the type of compression
  automatically: version 1.20 added support for lzma and
  version 1.22 for xz compression using LZMA2.  OS X 10.6 and
  later (and FreeBSD and some other OSes) have a tar (also
  known as bsdtar) from the libarchive project which
  can also detect gzip and bzip2 compression
  automatically.  For other flavours of tar, environment
  variable R_GZIPCMD gives the command to decompress
  gzip and compress files, and R_BZIPCMD
  for bzip2 files.
  Arguments compressed, extras and verbose are only
  used when an external tar is used.
  The internal implementation restores symbolic links as links on a
  Unix-alike, and as file copies on Windows (which works only for
  existing files, not for directories), and hard links as links.  If the
  linking operation fails (as it may on a FAT file system), a file copy
  is tried.  Since it uses gzfile to read a file it can
  handle files compressed by any of the methods that function can
  handle: at least compress, gzip, bzip2
  and xz compression, and some types of lzma
  compression.  It does not guard against restoring absolute file paths,
  as some tar implementations do.  It will create the parent
  directories for directories or files in the archive if necessary.  It
  handles the standard (USTAR/POSIX), GNU and pax ways of
  handling file paths of more than 100 bytes, and the GNU way of
  handling link targets of more than 100 bytes.
You may see warnings from the internal implementation such as
unsupported entry type 'x'This often indicates an invalid archive: entry types
"A-Z" are
  allowed as extensions, but other types are reserved.  The only thing
  you can do with such an archive is to find a tar program that
  handles it, and look carefully at the resulting files.  There may also
  be the warning using pax extended headersThis is indicates that additional information may have been discarded, such as ACLs, encodings ..., and long path and link names are only used as from R 2.15.3.
  The standards only support ASCII filenames (indeed, only alphanumeric
  plus period, underscore and hyphen).  untar makes no attempt to map
  filenames to those acceptable on the current system, and treats the
  filenames in the archive as applicable without any re-encoding in the
  current locale.
tar, unzip.