tar

tar (derived from tape archive and commonly referred to as "tarball") is both a file format (in the form of a type of archive bitstream) and the name of a program used to handle such files. The format was created in the early days of Unix and standardized by POSIX.1-1988 and later POSIX.1-2001.

Initially developed to be written directly to sequential I/O devices for tape backup purposes, it is now commonly used to collect many files into one larger file for distribution or archiving, while preserving file system information such as user and group permissions, dates, and directory structures.

Compression and naming:

Conventionally, uncompressed tar archive files have names ending in ".tar". Unlike ZIP archives, tar files (somefile.tar) are commonly compressed as a whole rather than piecemeal. Applying a compression utility such as gzip, bzip2, lzma or compress to a tar file produces a compressed tar file, typically named with an extension indicating the type of compression (e.g.: somefile.tar.gz).

Popular tar programs like the BSD and GNU versions of tar support the command line options -z (gzip), and -j (bzip2) to automatically compress or decompress the archive file it is currently working with. GNU tar from version 1.20 onwards also supports --lzma (LZMA). 1.21 also supports lzop via --lzop, and 1.22 adds support for xz via --xz or -J. Both will automatically extract compressed gzip and bzip2 archives with or without these options.
Tar archiving is often used together with a compression method, such as gzip, to create a compressed archive. As shown, the combination of the files in the archive are compressed as one unit.

MS-DOS's 8.3 filename limitations, and a desire for brevity, resulted in additional popular conventions for naming compressed tar archives, though this practice has declined with FAT offering long filenames.

* .tgz is equivalent to .tar.gz
* .tbz and .tb2 is equivalent to .tar.bz2
* .taz is equivalent to .tar.Z
* .tlz is equivalent to .tar.lzma
* .txz is equivalent to .tar.xz (Xz compression is not yet widely supported by common tar distributions [January 2010])

A tar file or compressed tar file is commonly referred to as a tarball.
Posted on May 31st, 2014

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