But are TAR and TAR.GZ files essentially the same? And if not, what is the difference between these two file types? You will discover the answers to these questions in this post.
How Is TAR.GZ Different From TAR?
Before you start creating and extracting compressed archive files, there are some things you should know. Many users don’t know the difference between a TAR file and a TAR.GZ file. For them, both are a collection of files compressed using some algorithm to save space on the system.
But that’s not completely true. To learn the main difference between a TAR and TAR.GZ file, you need to know the difference between archiving and compression. Archiving is the process of grouping together multiple files into a single common file. On the other hand, compression is the process of making a file smaller than its actual size.
A TAR file is what you’d call an archive, as it is only a collection of multiple files put together inside a single file. And a GZ file is a compressed file zipped using the gzip algorithm. Both the TAR and GZ files can exist independently as well, as a simple archive and a compressed file.
But when you combine them together, they form a “compressed archive” file, which is TAR.GZ. A tarball when zipped using a compression algorithm forms a compressed archive.
Working With Compressed Archives in Linux
On Linux, you can find several utilities to create, extract, and manage TAR.GZ files. While the tar and gzip utility often come preinstalled on most of the distros, users will have to manually install other command-line archive managers such as 7-Zip.
7-Zip released its official Linux version not so long ago. The 7-Zip package is not available on official distro repositories and you won’t be able to install it using the default package manager on your system. However, this doesn’t mean that installing 7-Zip on a Linux machine is not possible at all.
