Season Two Research Files
Episode Twenty-two
5:00am-6:00am
TARBALL
Tarball is a jargon term for a tar archive, or a group of files collected together as one. The term suggests a sticky ball of tar. Tar (which stands for "Tape Archive" because it was developed to backup files on tape) is a Unix command that creates a single file designated with the file suffix ".tar" that is an archive from a number of specified files. It also extracts the files from such an archive, using WinZip on Windows or Stuffit Expander on the Macintosh. The files in a tar archive are not compressed, but instead gathered together in one file and then backed up to tape, zipped and saved, or transferred to another system. Tarballs have been the standard way to ship around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s, even though the term's usage did not become commonplace until the late 1990s.
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