this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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I do NOT understand how zip is still the default. I use .tgz wherever I can.
What exactly is better about tar.gz over zip?
I tend to prefer zip because of cross compatibility with Windows with no extra software needed, and because the Windows software to unpackage a tar.gz that I have used required unpacking it twice (once for the gz, then again for the tar). It seemed like a hassle.
On Linux I command line everything, so they are the same to me, so I have no preference there. But is there something actually better about it?
With .zip you can extract just one file from it, while with .tar.gz you have to uncompress the whole .tar before you can get the files - so that's worse.
But, since you're compressing all files at once you could get better compression since information can be shared between files.