Zip using tar

So a decade after the introduction or tar , zip came out in the MS-DOS world as an archive format supporting compression. The most common compression scheme for zip is deflate which itself is an implementation of the LZ77 algorithm. So, in order to create a compressed archive , you have first to create an archive using the tar utility for example.

And after that, you will compress that archive. This is a. As computer science evolved, other compression algorithms were designed for higher compression ratio. For example, the Burrows—Wheeler algorithm implemented in bzip2 leading to. Or more recently xz which is an LZMA algorithm implementation similar to the one used in the 7zip utility. But as the zip format is natively supported on Windows, this one is especially present in cross-platform environments.

You can even find the zip file format in unexpected places. For example, that file format was retained by Sun for JAR archives used to distribute compiled Java applications. Or for OpenDocument files. All those files formats are zip archives in a disguise. All that being said, in the Unix-like world, I would still favor tar archive type because the zip file format does not support all the Unix file system metadata reliably.

For some concrete explanations of that last statement, you must know the ZIP file format only defines a small set of mandatory file attributes to store for each entry: filename, modification date, permissions. Beyond those basic attributes, an archiver may store additional metadata in the so-called extra field of the ZIP header. But, as extra fields are implementation-defined, there are no guarantees even for compliant archivers to store or retrieve the same set of metadata.

In that particular case, the Info-ZIP zip tool available on my Debian system stored some useful metadata in the extra field. But there is no guarantee for this extra field to be written by every archiver. And even if present, there is no guarantee for this to be understood by the tool used to extract the archive.

Whereas we cannot reject tradition as a motivation for still using tarballs , with this little example, you understand why there is still some corner? This is especially true when you want to preserve all standard file metadata.

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The TAR file format is a very early archiving format that doesn't include any active compression by default. Often on Linux, items are tarred and then gzipped to compress them. TAR files typically end in. Execute the following to create a single. Replace FILE with the filename of the file you are trying to uncompress.