Translation(s): English - Italiano

A Tarball is a commonly used name to refer to an archive file in the tar (Tape Archive) format. These files are produced by the command tar.

It is used widely to archive and unarchive files, which means to accumulate a large collection of files into a single archive file (packer), while preserving FileSystem information such as user and group permissions, dates, and directory structures. Tarballs are commonly used to pack source code.

tar itself does not support compression directly. It is most commonly used in tandem with an external compression utility such as gzip or bzip2. These compression utilities generally only compress a single file, hence the pairing with tar, which can produce a single file from many files.

The MIME type of tar archives is application/x-tar

File extensions

CategoryCompression CategoryFileFormat