
Only BSD tar supports lz4 natively (but GNU tar can do an equivalent with -use-compress-program=lz4/ -Ilz4). Tip: Both GNU and BSD tar automatically do decompression delegation for bzip2, compress, gzip, lzip, lzma, lzop, zstd, and xz compressed archives. Today only used for creating static library files.įile archiver via stdin/stdout, supports cpio and tar formats.Īrchiver to backup large live filesystems, takes care of hard links, extended attributes, sparse files and inode types.

Implementation of tar and cpio that also offers a library. Of course there are also tools that do both, which tend to additionally offer encryption, error detection and recovery.Ĭore utility for manipulating the ubiquitous tar archives (tarballs), which are used by pacman and the AUR. These tools are often used in sequence by firstly creating an archive file and then compressing it. A compression tool compresses and decompresses data, e.g.A file archiver combines several files into one archive file, e.g.

The traditional Unix archiving and compression tools are separated according to the Unix philosophy:
