> When you produce a compressed tar file, the contents are written into a tar file, and this tar file as a whole is compressed. I don't think that's quite how

> When you produce a compressed tar file, the contents are written into a tar file, and this tar file as a whole is compressed. I don't think that's quite how it works. I'm pretty sure it's more similar to doing something like `tar ... | gzip > output.tgz`. That is it streams the tar output through gzip before writing to the file. In fact with GNU tar at least you can use a `-I` option to use an arbitrary program to compress.