[clue] is tar deprecated? (talk)

[CP Constantine]

On 10/11/2011 12:30 PM, Mike Bean wrote:
> Our SQL guy asked me an interesting question, I didn't honestly have an
> answer, I thought it might be worthwhile to pose to the group.  He
> doesn't understand why .tgz is still in use.  To his mind, gzip renders
> the usefulness of tar questionable.  So why tar a file and THEN zip it,
> when you can just zip it???
>
> I honestly didn't know how to respond.  Any insights?

Tar supports extended filesystem attributes (owner, perms,flags), that 
b/gzip does not.

also, gzip only supports compressing a single file.

Ask your friend to do a system backup that will restore gracefully, 
using only zip :)

also, tar is an excellent tool for piping through. if you've ever tried 
to duplicate one filesystem to another with cp, all kinds of issues 
arise with hard and soft links.. however,

# tar -c <source filesystem> | tar -xv -C <destination filesystem>

is an excellent way to precisely duplicate one filesystem's contents to 
another, preserving as much structure and information as the filesystems 
have in common.