Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren't going to be compressed as much because they aren't handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won't propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

[–] herrvogel 13 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah that's a rather important point that's conveniently left out too often. I routinely extract individual files out of large archives. Pretty easy and quick with zip, painfully slow and inefficient with (most) tarballs.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

A tar directory also preserves file permissions. And can preserve groups/ownership if needed.

[–] QuaternionsRock 3 points 2 weeks ago

Can you evaluate the directory tree of a tar without decompressing? Not sure if gzip/bzip2 preserve that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Nowhere in here do you cover bzip, the subject of this meme. And tar does not compress.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's just a different layer of compression. Better than gzip generally, but the tradeoffs are exactly the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Well, yes. But your original comment has inaccuracies due to those 2 points.