Archive

An archive (Pronounced Ar-kive), in computing, is bundle of other files contained in one file itself. Technically, archives do not compress, rather just tieing together files and their structure, but in reality, many archive formats feature built-in compression, especially on non-Unix platforms.

Ubiquitous amongst Unix and Unix-like operating systems is the tape archive format, tar. Originally intended for use for transferring files on tape, it is generally used to combine files before they are compressed, usually by gzip or bzip2. Other formats include ar and shar.

On Windows platforms, the most widely-used archive format by far is zip; other popular formats are rar, ace and arj. On Amigas, the standard archive format is lha, while on Apple Macintosh computers, sea is among the most common.

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