Gzipped Tarball !full! May 2026

Here’s an engaging, blog-style post about ( .tar.gz or .tgz ), written for developers and Linux enthusiasts. The Humble .tar.gz : The Internet’s Unsung Packing Hero You’ve downloaded one a thousand times. You’ve typed tar -xzf file.tar.gz without thinking. But have you ever stopped to appreciate the weird, wonderful, and slightly historical genius of the gzipped tarball ?

So why not just use a ZIP file? Because tar preserves Unix file attributes (symlinks, hard links, device files, executables) in a way ZIP never quite got right. It’s the native “archive” format of the Unix world. gzipped tarball

# Create tar -czf archive.tar.gz folder/ tar -xzf archive.tar.gz Here’s an engaging, blog-style post about (

If you tar -cf myfiles.tar folder/ , you get a .tar file that’s often larger than the original folder (due to metadata and padding). But have you ever stopped to appreciate the

gunzip -c myfolder.tar.gz | tar -xf - This is in action. Two tools, each doing one thing well, combined into a powerhouse. 🔄 Part 3: Why Not Just Use ZIP? ZIP does both: archiving + compression. So why does the open-source world still love .tar.gz ?