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this is important, because anyone with any degree of genuine curiosity will have at least seen a tar file in the context of compression. if you use winrar, tar

by jdavid 19y ago

this is important, because anyone with any degree of genuine curiosity will have at least seen a tar file in the context of compression. if you use winrar, tar files are included in the open file list. with any sense of curiosity and intuition one would guess a tar file has to do with compression. i may not expect someone to know how to use a tar, but i would expect them to know what one is.

BrandonM 19y ago
...except that a tar file really has nothing to do with compression at all. It's just a way of serializing a hierarchy of files into a single file, without any compression. The compression comes when you run gzip or bzip2 (typically using the -z or -j option to tar) on the tar file.