Archive & Compression Utilities
Long before utilities such as StuffIt and Zip existed—long before the Mac existed, in fact!—Unix users could group files together into archives and compress the archives to take up less disk space, which was vastly more expensive then. Unix offers several archiving and compression tools:
tar (short for tape archive) was originally used to combine a collection of files into a single file, which was written to tape. But you don’t have to write the file to tape; you can write it to any device your Unix system knows about: disks, tapes, CD-Rs, even Terminal.
compress and uncompress do what you probably expect them to: compress and expand files. Text files are very compressible, sometimes 10 to 1. Files that have already ...
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