WAR stands for Web Archive.

WAR-files are basically standard Java Archives (JAR), but with special structure, which make them suitable for distributing web applications, as per the servlet standard.

Since JAR (and therefore, WAR), is compatible with the ZIP standard, you can extract JARs and WARs using any archiver that can handle ZIP files. Typical programs are 7-Zip, WinZip, InfoZip or pkzip. However, with Java JDK you get a special tool for handling JAR-files, which is called "jar". To extract a WAR-file, you could simply say

jar xvf JSPWiki.war Note how the jar syntax is very close to the UNIX "tar" -syntax :-).

To create JAR files and WAR-files, the use of the "jar" tool is recommended. Otherwise some important files, such as the JAR manifest won't be included.