File - Archive

About

An archive is a tree of file and directory that are grouped in one file.

An archive is use for:

• data compression and archiving. During the creation of the archive, a compression algorithm is applied to reduce the size of the data
• but also file distribution such as:
  • packaging code
  • or sending a whole directory and all its children

This is an encoding format.

Logically, you can see an archive as a local file system because you can:

• delete
• rename
• put

any file and directory inside an archive.

Format

The most well known archive format are:

• Zip File
• Gzip (GNU zip)
• File - Tarball (tar.gz file, untar)