Hi all,
Can anyone please say me what exactly a 'tar' command does? From what all I know, its not basically a compression tool. But I have seen many used it for compression purpose.
If you have any links or any stuff which can help me better understand about 'tar', that will be greatly appreciated...
It will be of great help for me if you can please put up some examples as well...
Thanks!
tar is short for Tape ARchiver. It's original purpose was to create tape archives, meaning a collection of files (uncompressed). Over time, people came to use it for archiving and compressing into files, since tar can write it's output to STDOUT, which can be piped into a compression program like compress or gzip.
GNU tar now includes an option to skip the shell piping and use gzip or bzip2 directly.