A tarball is a (usually) compressed file that contains one
or more other files and was created using the UNIX/GNU
tar program and (optionally) a compression program like gzip.

Tar with compression is similar to the use of PKZIP (WinZip,
or ZIP or similar).  TAR is Tape ARchive and is designed to
group one or more files in an archive to a file or media.  Files are
archived with owner, permissions, path, etc.  For more info,
RTFM man page on tar.  Also note, CPIO (used internally by RPM)
is another archive format widely used (not addressed herein).

Unlike RPM, tar files do not contain any pre-install or post-install
scripts, dependency information, nor any other information like
description, etc. (for example, use rpm –querytags to see a list
of what RPM can provide).

Linux/UNIX use several compression formats:

GZIP      -- GNU ZIP (a fast compression similar to PKZIP)
ZIP       -- PKZIP compatible compression (long file names)
BZ/BZ2    -- BZIP and BZIP2 -- new, slower but generate smaller files
Z         -- UNIZ compress (not as good nor as fast as GZIP)
LZ        -- LZ compression (not widely used)

Standard suffixes (usually mapped to mime types):

.gz   -- file is compressed with GZIP (gzip or gzip.exe)
.tgz  -- tar file compressed with GZIP
.Z    -- file if compressed with older UNIX compress
.bz   -- file is compressed with bzip (new, replaced by bz2)
.bz2  -- file is compressed with bzip2 (new, better than gzip/pkzip)
.zip  -- file is compressed with zip (pkzip or compat., zip)
               typically ZIP is not used with tar, but an archive
               may contain a tar file
.tar.gz or .tar.Z or .tar.bz or .tar.bz2  -- file is a tar file
               with compression (see suffixes above, e.g., gz)

File extraction:

file.tar              -- tar file w/o compression
   tar tvf file.tar   -- test the file [ALWAYS DO FIRST]
   tar xvf file.tar   -- extract the file

file.tar.gz or .tgz or .Z:
   tar -tvzf file.tgz  -- test
   tar -xvzf file.tgz  -- extract
   tar -xvvzf archiv.tar.gz -- extract
   gunzip -cd file.tgz | tar xvf -    -- use with older
                                            non-zip aware TAR
                                            (e.g., Solaris)

file.bz:
   bzip -cd file.bz | tar xvf -

file.bz2
   bzip2 -cd file.bz | tar xvf -

File creation:

tar cvzf file.tgz [list of files to compress]
tar cvf - [file list] | gzip >file.tgz
tar cvf - [file list] |  bzip2 >file.tar.bz2

Use of TAR to copy a directory tree (with permissions, recursive, etc.):

This should be a program like dircopy or xcopy

   cd source_directory
   tar cvf - * |  ( cd dest_dir ; tar xvf - )

Beispiel

Archive mit Inhalt von /etc und /home erstellen:

tar cvf test.tar /etc/ /home/
tar cvf - /etc /home | gzip > test.tar.gz
tar czvf test.tar.gz /etc/ /home/         # *GNU tar* Kurzform

Archive entpacken:

tar xvf test.tar
gunzip < test.tar.gz | tar xvf -
tar xzvf test.tar.gz                      # *GNU tar* Kurzform

Archivinhalt ansehen:

tar tvf test.tar
gunzip < test.tar.gz | tar tf -
tar tzvf test.tar.gz                      # *GNU tar* Kurzform