No, gzip compressed tape archive has nothing to do with the tape archiver or the archiver format. Pipe the format to stdout without using compression and then i

No, gzip compressed tape archive has nothing to do with the tape archiver or the archiver format. Pipe the format to stdout without using compression and then it should be pretty obvious. This isn't Windows, Atari TOS or AmigaOS where archivers like pkzip and lha or lzx are also (de)compressors: that is precisely why on UNIX, gzip, compress, bzip2 or xz can only compress one single file and aren't archivers. They're dedicated (de)compressors. cpio, ar, pax and tar serve as dedicated archivers.