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

[Philip S Tellis]

Sometime Today, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:

> more popular in Windows. I can imagine 'zipping' as compressing the
> data . Over a few days I have realised that tar format of compresion

tar is not a compression format, it is an archive format.

> is the more widely used format not only for backing up data locally
> on the hard disk but also for distribution of software. So why is it
> called tar and why the file called tarball?

have you tried doing man tar or info tar?  tar stands for tape archive.
For history read info tar.  Tarball means a ball of tar, generally
compressed using gzip (.gz) or bzip2 (.bz2) or compress (.Z).

Philip

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