[PLUG] tar help

[Kenneth B. Hill]

I hope that I am replying to the list correctly; I get them in a  
bundle once or twice a day. What is the difference between tar and  
zip (or gzip or gz). Galen Seitz (and/or Michael Rasmussen) replied  
to my comment below that tar does not compress files; I thought it  
did. I use the Ubuntu distro and the gzip from the command line to  
compress very large files 5+ MB to an archive type of directory. I  
thought that tar did a similar type of compression but with a  
different file name extension. Can someone provide me with some  
further insight?

Ken

-------------------
Message: 5
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 18:32:32 -0700
From: Galen Seitz <galens at seitzassoc.com>
Subject: Re: [PLUG] tar help
To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
	<plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
Message-ID: <463A8D30.80904 at seitzassoc.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Michael Rasmussen wrote:

> Kenneth B. Hill wrote:
>
>> I don't use tar much to compress files; rather, I prfer gzip. Some MS
>> Windows PCs don't recognize the .tar extension. I hope this helps.
>>
>
> tar doesn't compress files at all. never has.
> the -z and -Z options filter the tar contents through compress or gzip
>
>

And gnu tar with the -j option will use bzip2.  This is used on the
kernels at kernel.org(.tar.bz2) and other places.

galen