Gzipped: Tarball

The flags stick like glue: reate, e x tract, z (gzip), f ile. 🎁 Final Thought The next time you curl a .tar.gz of some GitHub repo, think of the 1970s tape drives, the 1990s compression wars, and the stubborn Unix philosophy of “do one thing well.”

gunzip -c myfolder.tar.gz | tar -xf - This is in action. Two tools, each doing one thing well, combined into a powerhouse. 🔄 Part 3: Why Not Just Use ZIP? ZIP does both: archiving + compression. So why does the open-source world still love .tar.gz ?

So why not just use a ZIP file? Because tar preserves Unix file attributes (symlinks, hard links, device files, executables) in a way ZIP never quite got right. It’s the native “archive” format of the Unix world. gzipped tarball

It’s not broken. It never needed fixing.

Here’s an engaging, blog-style post about ( .tar.gz or .tgz ), written for developers and Linux enthusiasts. The Humble .tar.gz : The Internet’s Unsung Packing Hero You’ve downloaded one a thousand times. You’ve typed tar -xzf file.tar.gz without thinking. But have you ever stopped to appreciate the weird, wonderful, and slightly historical genius of the gzipped tarball ? The flags stick like glue: reate, e x tract, z (gzip), f ile

Now go forth and tar -xzf something. 🐧 Would you like a follow-up post about or building your own tar-like archiver in Python ?

# Create tar -czf archive.tar.gz folder/ tar -xzf archive.tar.gz 🔄 Part 3: Why Not Just Use ZIP

But a plain tarball is chunky. gzip (GNU zip) is a compression tool. It’s brilliant at one thing: taking a single stream of bytes and squeezing out redundancy using the DEFLATE algorithm.