opening an .a extension?

I am creating static libraries in c/c++ and the build output is an .a file.
I believe these are archive files which just contain the .o files ... but I want to few exactly what is in my .a file.

I am on windows XP ...
What do I need to few what is in these .a files.

Thanks

A disassembler.

I know how to disassembly .o files my problem is I don't have any software that opens the .a file to get the .o files out of them.
Winzip doesn't work.
I am on windows xp and the .a file was created thru netbeans static library project using MinGW.

So does anybody know what software allows me to view/extract the contains of a .a file in windows

Thanks
Sorry for the confusion on the question

WinZip?! It's not an archive--it's a library file.

Sam Doder wrote:I am creating static libraries ... but I want to few exactly what is in my .a file.

You are creating the files and you want to know what is in them? I must be missing something here, because to me it would appear that the file would contain whatever you put it in.

Nevertheless, have you looked at the ar command?

Since you are working under Windows, you may need the compiler/linker/archiver tools that were used to create the archive. If it was created using the Microsoft C++ development tools, you may need those specific tools. If it was created using Cygwin, then you may need those tools. And if it was created on a Linux machine you are probably out of luck - you would probably need to look at the file in Linux.

Or objdump, or...