The term tar is short for tape archive. A tarball or tarfile is name of group or archive of files that are bundled together using the tar command. They usually have the .tar file extension.

If the tarfile is compressed using gzip command, the tarball will end with .tar.gz. Using the gunzip command Linux users can uncompress the file and Microsoft Windows users can also create and extract tarball files using the 7-Zip compression utility.

Archive, Compressed file, Computer abbreviations, Gzip, Software terms

  • See the Linux tar command page for additional information about the command.
  • How to extract or decompress a compressed file.