Tar

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:56 am
(1) Short for tape archive, a UNIX utility that combines a group of files into a single file. The resulting file has a .tar extension.

The tar command does not compress files. Frequently, therefore, a tar file is compressed with the compress or gzip commands to create a file with a .tar.gz or .tar.Z extension. These are comparable to files that have been compressed with PKZIP on a PC platform. Most PC compression utilities, including PKZIP, can open (untar) a tar file.

(2)(v) To combine files with the tar command.