Tar (derived from tape archive and commonly referred to as "tarball") is both a file format(in the form of a type of and the name of a program used to handle such files.
Conventionally, uncompressed tar archive files have names ending in ".tar".
Unlike ZIP archives, tar files (somefile.tar) are commonly compressed as a whole rather than piecemeal. Applying a utility such as gzip, bzip2, lzip, lzma or compress to a tar file produces a compressed tar file, typically named with an extension indicating the type of compression ( e.g.: somefile.tar.gz).
A tar file is the concatenation of one or more files. Each file is preceded by a 512-byte record. The file data is written unaltered except that its length is rounded up to a multiple of 512 bytes and the extra space is zero filled. The end of an archive is marked by at least two consecutive zero-filled records. (The origin of tar's record size appears to be the 512-byte disk sectors used in the Version 7 Unix file system.)
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