In computing, the tar file format is a type of archive file format: the *T*ape *AR*chive format. These files are produced by the ["Unix"] command tar and were standardized by POSIX.1-1998 and later POSIX.1-2001.
It is used widely to archive and unarchive files, which means to accumulate a large collection of files into a single archive file (packer), while preserving FileSystem information such as user and group permissions, dates, and ["directory"] structures.
Commonly a tar file is referred to as a tarball . Tarballs are not DebianPackage s, because DebianPackage s can be downloaded and installed using ?AptGet .
In the Unix philosophy of "one job, one program", it does not support compression directly. If you then want to compress your archive, you use a separate program that is specialised in compression. tar is most commonly used in tandem with an external compression utility such as ["gzip"] or ["bzip2"], since it has no built in data compression facilities. These compression utilities generally only compress a single file, hence the pairing with tar, which can produce a single file from many files.
Filename extension
- .tar , for tar file.
- .tar.gz or .tgz (only when compressed by gzip)
- .tar.bz2 or .tbz (only when compressed by bzip2)
MIME-Type
- application/x-tar
Installation
After unpacking and uncompressing, the installation procedure is the standard GNU one:
$ ./configure
$ ["make"]
$ make install
See also:
{Wikipedia:tarball}
["FileRoller"] in DebianGnome, that can uncompress and unpacked files.