Tar


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In computing, tar is a type of packing file format: the Tape ARchive format. It is used widely in the Unix-like world (including Linux) and more recently in Microsoft Windows. Tar does not support compression, but is used to accumulate a large collection of files into a single archive file (packer), while preserving filesystem information such as user/group, permissions, date, and directory structure.

A tar file ("tarball") that is subsequently compressed using gzip usually has an extension of .tar.gz (.tar being the tar file, .gz being added by gzip). Due to the limitations on file extensions on DOS, these are also sometimes called TGZ files.