Tarball

tar, zip, and friends

Sometimes you'll get a bunch of files squished together into one file, called an archive. On Linux the most common one is the .tar file, and people call them tarballs (which is honestly an incredible name).

A lot of the time they're also compressed, so you'll see endings like .tar.gz.

tar

The tar command has a ton of flags and nobody remembers all of them. Just remember these two:

Here's what the letters actually mean, so it's not just magic:

When extracting, tar figures out the compression on its own. When creating a compressed one, add a z:

[user@linux]$ tar -czvf archive.tar.gz [files]

zip

You'll also run into .zip files, which are way simpler:

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Your turn

You've got mail! There's a package waiting for you at ~/mail/package.tar.gz. Open it up and see what's inside.