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Archive and Source

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pkd_lives:
I feel stupid asking this as I feel I should know it.

Is tar(ball) the source code of a program? If so what is specific to make it a tarball as opposed to a listing.

And I thought tarballing was a way of archiving, so what is zip (gz or bz2) doing that tarball doesn't - Just emptying the spare zeros from the code listing?

Now in addition does the following answer true?

gzip -d [package.name].tar.gz
tar -xvf [package.name].tar

is equivalent to

tar -xvzf [package.name].tar.gz
(with a j instead of a z for bz2)

If someone could help clarify these issues I would be most grateful.

flap:
A tar file is just a single file containing a number of other files, like a zip file but without compression - it's not specific to source code. Tar files are filtered through a utility like gzip in order to compress them.

Yes, they're equivalent.

voidmain:
"tar" actually stands for "Tape Archive" as it was created originally to dump/stream files and file systems to tape. Since a tape device (or any other device) in unix is accessed via a file name that is open/closed and written to much like any other file you can give tar any name and it will happily stream that data to a regular file just as it does to a tape device (I love UNIX).

"tar" files also store the ownership, permissions, type, time and date of the files that are archived so you can restore them to the exact state that they were when you archived them. When networking became popular it was easier to transfer smaller file archives over the network rather than snail mailing someone a tape. Compressing the archive makes it take up less disk/tape space. Together tar and gzip/bzip/compress are much like zip.

But maybe that's more than you wanted to know. And it has nothing to do with what is contained inside it (tar.gz != source code).

[ November 01, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

Kintaro:
Yea you could tar/bzip2 directly to a Hard Disk so you get extra space (and no formatting).

I have an old tape drive here of a Mainframe, but i need to read the documentation so i can hook it upto a PC.

voidmain:

quote:Originally posted by Ex Eleven / b0b 2.1:
Yea you could tar/bzip2 directly to a Hard Disk so you get extra space (and no formatting).
--- End quote ---


If you want to do that you might as well run a compressed file system.

 
quote:I have an old tape drive here of a Mainframe, but i need to read the documentation so i can hook it upto a PC.
--- End quote ---


Is it a 1/2" 9 track tape?  We had around 100,000 of them in our mainframe library. But those tape drives couldn't be hooked up to a PC, they were connected to the mainframe via "bus & tag" cables. Those cables are "huge". And the drives we had were over 6 feet tall and about 3 feet wide by about 3 feet deep. But I have seen 9 track drives that would hook up to a PC and read mainframe tapes.

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