What is a good replacement for, e.g., Windows Zip files or Macintoshs StuffIt?
Most Linux distributions, such as Ark, already come with support for regular Zip files. We would recommend, however, Tarballs (.tar) that are compressed with either GNU Zip (.gz) or BZip2 (.bz2) compression. Tarballs are a way to pull together multiple files or directories (folders) into one place, but they are commonly used on a single file or directory as a preliminary preparation for compression. Tarball stands for Tape Archive (don’t ask where the Ball comes from, we simply don’t know!) and supports many of the features of proprietary formats such as Zip or RAR, only without the compression. This is where GNU Zip (GZip) and BZip2 come in. GZip and BZip2 do not support any of the archiving capabilities of Zip or RAR, all they are good for is compression. GZip is faster than BZip2, but it does not compress files as small. BZip2 has better compression, but is slower than GZip. You do not have to combine Tarballs with GZip or BZip2. You can use one or the other. It is just considered g
