The .tar.gz is not glamorous. It doesn’t have a cool logo. But it’s carried source code across continents, slotted into CI pipelines, and faithfully restored countless backups.
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. gzipped tarball
Let’s unpack it. (Pun intended.) First, meet tar (Tape ARchive). Born in the early days of Unix, tar was designed for tape drives . Its job was simple: Take a bunch of files and folders, glue them into one big byte stream, preserving permissions, owners, and directory structure. That’s it. No compression. Just packing . But a plain tarball is chunky
But gzip cannot pack multiple files. Give it a directory, and it says: “No, thanks.” Let’s unpack it
Now go forth and tar -xzf something. 🐧 Would you like a follow-up post about or building your own tar-like archiver in Python ?