@wallhackio @vaporeon_ do you know what a .tar.gz is

@aescling @vaporeon_ I've heard it referred to as a tarball, is that what you're asking

@wallhackio @vaporeon_ it’s a zip-compressed (typically with gzip(1)) tarball, more precisely. if you unzip you get a tar(1) archive. a tar archive is a plaintext (mostly plaintext?) bundle of files; if you untar it you get the files laid out in the specified directory structure, along with their file purrmissions and such

@aescling @wallhackio Wait, do gzip and zip use the same compression? Thaty's what you seem to implying with the phrase "zip-compressed (typically with gzip(1))"...

To be clear: you would run gunzip (counterpart to gzip), to turn something.tar.gz into something.tar. But you don't even need that extra step, you can just tar xzf something.tar.gz and tar will do it for you. x means eXtract, z means gZipped file, f means you'll pass a file as argument instead of having it read from standard input. Actually, modern versions of GNU tar can even detect the compression automatically, you can just say tar xf something.tar.gz!

@aescling @wallhackio tar itself, unlike zip, doesn't compress anything. It just turns many files into a single file. (And the name is short for "tape archive"!) So if you're uploading a file to the Internet for distribution, you'd typically compress it with gzip (.tar.gz) or bzip2 (.tar.bz2) or lz (.tar.lz) or xz (.tar.xz).

@vaporeon_ @wallhackio i think it's the same purrotocol

@aescling @wallhackio @vaporeon_ If we're being technical about it, it's actually gzipped, not zipped: both are file formats that [mostly] use DEFLATE for compression, but the former only supports one stream of data (which is why you often use tar inside, to denote multiple files and attributes), while the latter has a directory structure and supports multiple files (but not many file attributes, there are extensions for that - but not with universal support).