Sometime Today, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:
more popular in Windows. I can imagine 'zipping' as compressing the data . Over a few days I have realised that tar format of compresion
tar is not a compression format, it is an archive format.
is the more widely used format not only for backing up data locally on the hard disk but also for distribution of software. So why is it called tar and why the file called tarball?
have you tried doing man tar or info tar? tar stands for tape archive. For history read info tar. Tarball means a ball of tar, generally compressed using gzip (.gz) or bzip2 (.bz2) or compress (.Z).
Philip