[ILUG-BOM] tarballs-why r they so called?

[Manish Jethani]

Sometime today, Nikhil Joshi wrote:

> So why is it called tar and why the file called tarball?

Tar stands for "tape archive", from the days when people used to
back up their data onto tapes.  Tar does not compress data, it
only creates one tarfile (or tarball) out of many regular data
files.  It does one thing, and does it well.  You can compress a
tarfile by running gzip, compress, bzip, etc. over it.

Manish

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