Does tar really "compress" files ?

[dunome]

Hello !

I use "tar" (tar.gz) during a while now (it's not like I had much of a choice actually ), but I'm really questionning its efficacy. Does it really compress files ?

I mean, apart from archiving files, isn't it supposed to "reduce" the size of all the files at the same time.

For example, if I compress 2x2GB files (4GB), my archive is 4GB as well. Normally it is like 2,8GB right (example), or I am totally wrong ?

Thanks for your help

[Mute Ant]

Strictly, no, tar does not compress anything. tar comes from Tape-And-Rewind which stacks the files end-to-end to send them to a serial storage device, like a tape recorder. The gz part is the compression, but it's not magic. If there's no redundancy in the data, such as a collection of JPEG files, the 'compressed' output can even be slightly larger than the originals.

[thx-1138]

...as Mute Ant said...any 'reduction' is done by external algorithms:
check in a terminal tar --help, scroll down a bit to see the currently supported ones...
Ie. for up-to-date 'scientific' comparisons of such with different datasets as input,
i guess you could google something like bzip2 vs gzip vs lzma vs xz etc...

[Bolle1961]

tar comes from Tape-And-Rewind which stacks the files end-to-end to send them to a serial storage device, like a tape recorder.

Not quite right, it comes from tape archive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)

[Flemur]

Not quite right, it comes from tape archive

I actually used it for that, way back in the time of tapes.