.tar, .gzzzzzz, RPM YUM(my?)

[Chris Gow]

On Tuesday 21 August 2007 15:42:55 Donald &/or Mila Trombley wrote:
> I am puzzled as to what these formats  ( *.gz, *.tar, RPM, and TAR) are,
> AND,  what they are for, and, how to utilize them.....
>
> Thanks,
> Don.

gz is a compressed file format similar to zip.

tar and TAR are Tape ARchives and were originally used on Unix systems for 
backups. Tar itself does not do any compression but will append multiple 
individual files into one archive file. Generally you use tar in conjunction 
with gzip to create a compressed archive:

tar zcf myarchive.tar.gz .

The above command should create a compressed archive called myarchive.tar.gz 
containing all the files in the current directory.

You may also see the extension tgz which is a shortform or tar.gz.

RPM is a file format for distributing packages. It was originally used on Red 
Hat but many other distributions have used the file format and is no longer 
used by just RH. It is similar to *.deb files that Ubuntu and Debian use but 
RPMs are not compatible with Debian/Ubuntu. There are tools that will convert 
an RPM to a DEB IIRC. I'd suggest however that instead of converting the RPM, 
you look in your repository manager (synaptic, adept, apt) and see if a DEB 
already exists for that package. In most cases Ubuntu will already have that 
package for you.

hth

-- chris