I usually assumed that tar was a compression utility, but I am unsure, does it actually compress files, or is it just like an ISO file, a file to hold files?
Does tar actually compress files, or just group them together
compressiontar
compressiontar
I usually assumed that tar was a compression utility, but I am unsure, does it actually compress files, or is it just like an ISO file, a file to hold files?
Best Answer
Tar is an archiving tool (Tape ARchive), it only collects files and their metadata together and produces one file. If you want to compress that file later you can use gzip/bzip2/xz. For convenience, tar provides arguments to compress the archive automatically for you. Checkout the tar man page for more details.