On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 04:03:23PM +0200, Frank Nordberg wrote:
| Bert Van Vreckem wrote:
| > To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:
|
| Oh. I thought .tar was just for text files.
tar actually stands for Tape ARchive because it was originally
developed for the purpose of storing multiple files from a disk onto a
backup tape. It is sort of like a filesystem inside a file because
tapes only store sequencial data and don't have a filesystem like
disks do. The most common use of tar nowadays is to bundle a bunch of
files into one file, usually so that they can be compressed by gzip.
gzip, unlike (pk)zip, only operates on a single file so the tar+gzip
combination works quite well. It also follows the Unix philosophy of
"do one thing and do it well".
-D
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