tar and gzip

c0c0deuz · 10-31-2002, 10:12 AM

I understand that tar is an archiving utility and that gzip is a compression utility.
I tought that archiving was a way to compress the data so it can be put aside without taking much room on the disk.

What did i misunderstood, why compressing a compressed file?

daxy · 10-31-2002, 10:22 AM

With tar you can collect several files to 1 file. then use gzip to compress it (yes, if you collect several zipped files it won't make any difference)...

jglen490 · 10-31-2002, 03:04 PM

The tar utility, which comes from (t)ape (ar)chive, does not compress files (except for any slack space). The gzip utility does compress files. So, if you "tar" a bunch a of files together into an archive, the total length of that "tar" file is not significantly different from the total space those files occupied on disk (again, except for any slack). Then gzip actually crunches the archive file down to a smaller size by applying whatever compression algorithm it incorporates.