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In computing, tar is a computer software utility for collecting many files into one archive file, often referred to as a tarball, for distribution or backup purposes. The name is derived from "tape archive", as it was originally developed to write data to sequential I/O devices with no file system of their own, such as devices that use magnetic tape.
A single file container/archive that can be reconstructed even after total loss of file system structures. .tar application/x-tar Tape archive: Unix-like A common archive format used on Unix-like systems. Generally used in conjunction with compressors such as gzip, bzip2, compress or xz to create .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.Z or tar.xz files.
A tar.gz is created by joining the files in tar and then compressing with gzip. In computing, solid compression is a method for data compression of multiple files, wherein all the uncompressed files are concatenated and treated as a single data block. Such an archive is called a solid archive.
tar.z Compressed file (often tar zip) using LZH algorithm 2D 68 6C 30 2D-lh0-2 lzh Lempel Ziv Huffman archive file Method 0 (No compression) 2D 68 6C 35 2D-lh5-2 lzh Lempel Ziv Huffman archive file Method 5 (8 KiB sliding window) 42 41 43 4B 4D 49 4B 45 44 49 53 4B: BACKMIKEDISK: 0 bac AmiBack Amiga Backup data file 49 4E 44 58: INDX: 0 idx
.bak, .bk – Bak file various backup formats: some just copies of data files, some in application-specific data backup formats, some formats for general file backup programs; BIN – binary data, often memory dumps of executable code or data to be re-used by the same software that originated it
Archive files are particularly useful in that they store file system data and metadata within the contents of a particular file, and thus can be stored on systems or sent over channels that do not support the file system in question, only file contents – examples include sending a directory structure over email, files with names unsupported on the target file system due to length or ...
File archivers may employ lossless data compression in their archive formats to reduce the size of the archive. Basic archivers just take a list of files and concatenate their contents sequentially into archives. The archive files need to store metadata, at least the names and lengths of the original files, if proper reconstruction is possible.
Files compressed by compress are typically given the extension ".Z" (modeled after the earlier pack program which used the extension ".z"). Most tar programs will pipe their data through compress when given the command line option "-Z". (The tar program in its own does not compress; it just stores multiple files within one tape archive.)