Take the 2-minute tour ×  I have an issue with a tarball created
on a SuSe 10.3 Server version. The .tar file has a size of 6.5
GB but if I untar it under Ubuntu 9.10 the resulting folder only
has a size of 1.5 GB.  commands used: tar cvf for packing, tar
xvf for unpacking.  Perhaps somebody knows how this can be
fixed, would be great,   share|improve this question  4 Answers
4  if you have symlinks or hardlinks in the directory, then tar
might be adding each one as a seperate file. When you then
decompress it on a linux filesystem, it would reinstate the
links and then everything would take up less space.  Tar is not
for compression, just for creating a file containing multiple
files. That is why you usually find it piped through gzip or
bzip.  share|improve this answer There are versions of tar out
there that will do compression and decompression, but "cvf" and
"xvf" aren't going to trigger that, in any version I know of. – 
David Thornley Jan 30 '10 at 15:54 some versions of tar (gnu tar
does, irrc) have w