Tar (Linux tool)

tar, short for tape archive, is a Linux utility to compress directories into a single file and then decompress them.

A tarball, the name for a file created by tar, has the file extension ".tar".

tar is often used with data compression tools such as GZip or xz to compress the created tarballs. This is done because the tarballs are often quite large.

Since the tarball contains every file in a directory, it is as big or slightly bigger than all of the files by themself.

tarballs also contain the metadata (information about data) of the files it contains. This means that tarballs do not lose any data from the files it works with. tarballs are often useful when dealing with many files, like when distributing or backing up software, because one single file is often easier to work with, instead of multiple.