Comment by tombert
Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.
Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.
What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all?
I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.
A tar of gzip or zip files doesn't make sense. But gzipping or zipping a tar does.
Gzip only compresses a single file, so .tar.gz lets you bundle multiple files. You can do the same thing with zip, of course, but...
Zip compresses individual files separately in the container, ignoring redundancies between files. But .tar.gz (and .tar.zip, though I've rarely seen that combination) bundles the files together and then compresses them, so can get better compression than .zip alone.
You for got the -z (or -a with a recent gnutar).