\item[tar (tarball)] Tar is shorthand for ``tape archive.'' Although tape archives are no longer around, tarballs are a common file archive format in Linux. Tarballs are not compressed, but you can use a compression tool such as gzip or bzip2 when creating them to compress the files. The common file extension for a tarball is .tar, as in archive.tar. When combined with gzip, tarballs often take the filename format archive.tar.gz and when combined with bzip2, filenames often assume the filename archive.tar.bz2.