On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 03:22:07PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote: > > tar is not compression, it's an archive (tar = Tape ARchive). You generally > > zip tarballs with either bzip (*.tar.bz) or gzip (*.tar.gz or *.tgz). I > > don't know if KDE defaults to one of these. > > > > The file manager entry says Compress -> As Zip/Tar so I suppose that > the tarballs are compressed with Zip. The other tow entries are "As > Zip" and "As Rar" so I cannot imagine what benefit Zip/Tar has over > Zip. > > > > If you're sending files to people, in general, a *nixy user will be > > expecting a zipped tarball, most Windows Users will be expecting a zip > > archive. More 'power' windows users will be expecting .rars. > > > > These are backup directories for my own use. Why is Rar considered a > power user tool? Is it superior (more compressed, faster, less prone > to corruption)?
Its a properitary format. If you want good performance, go for 7zip (as an archiver, or lzma instead of gzip). In fact, I'm quite surprised to see it is not supported there. > > > > Zip is probably the most widely-supported, but not always installed by > > default on Linux distros. I've never found a [b|g]zipped tarball to be > > particularly lacking. > > > > I don't think that any of them are lacking, but I would like to know > each format's features and benefits. Thanks. Tar is most likely to preserve all features of a Linux file system. Zip, unlike tar, provides more of random-access to the contents of the archive: no need to read the whole archive to get a single file. Rar has two modes: The "solid" one provides better compression but has the same issue as Tar. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best ICQ# 16849754 | | friend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
