tar: Definitions
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1 1.2 Some Definitions
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1 The 'tar' program is used to create and manipulate 'tar' archives. An
1 "archive" is a single file which contains the contents of many files,
1 while still identifying the names of the files, their owner(s), and so
1 forth. (In addition, archives record access permissions, user and
1 group, size in bytes, and data modification time. Some archives also
1 record the file names in each archived directory, as well as other file
1 and directory information.) You can use 'tar' to "create" a new archive
1 in a specified directory.
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1 The files inside an archive are called "members". Within this
1 manual, we use the term "file" to refer only to files accessible in the
1 normal ways (by 'ls', 'cat', and so forth), and the term "member" to
1 refer only to the members of an archive. Similarly, a "file name" is
1 the name of a file, as it resides in the file system, and a "member
1 name" is the name of an archive member within the archive.
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1 The term "extraction" refers to the process of copying an archive
1 member (or multiple members) into a file in the file system. Extracting
1 all the members of an archive is often called "extracting the archive".
1 The term "unpack" can also be used to refer to the extraction of many or
1 all the members of an archive. Extracting an archive does not destroy
1 the archive's structure, just as creating an archive does not destroy
1 the copies of the files that exist outside of the archive. You may also
1 "list" the members in a given archive (this is often thought of as
1 "printing" them to the standard output, or the command line), or
1 "append" members to a pre-existing archive. All of these operations can
1 be performed using 'tar'.
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