Tar - technical definition

Stands for tape archive. It is the most commonly used archiving tool on UNIX systems. Many free software packages are available on the Internet as a compressed tar archive.

See Also: Compression.

See Tar in Computer


(Tape ARchive) A Unix utility that is used to archive files by combining several files into one. It is often used in conjunction with the "compress" or "gzip" commands to compress the data. The name came from the days when magnetic tape was the predominant storage medium rather than disk. Tar archives are often called "tarballs." See archive formats.



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