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(tar.info)Definitions


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Some Definitions
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   The `tar' program is used to create and manipulate `tar' archives.
An "archive" is a single file which contains the contents of many
files, while still identifying the names of the files, their owner(s),
and so forth.  (In addition, archives record access permissions, user
and group, size in bytes, and last modification time.  Some archives
also record the file names in each archived directory, as well as other
file and directory information.)  You can use `tar' to "create" a new
archive in a specified directory.

   The files inside an archive are called "members".  Within this
manual, we use the term "file" to refer only to files accessible in the
normal ways (by `ls', `cat', and so forth), and the term "member" to
refer only to the members of an archive.  Similarly, a "file name" is
the name of a file, as it resides in the filesystem, and a "member
name" is the name of an archive member within the archive.

   The term "extraction" refers to the process of copying an archive
member (or multiple members) into a file in the filesystem.  Extracting
all the members of an archive is often called "extracting the archive".
The term "unpack" can also be used to refer to the extraction of many
or all the members of an archive.  Extracting an archive does not
destroy the archive's structure, just as creating an archive does not
destroy the copies of the files that exist outside of the archive.  You
may also "list" the members in a given archive (this is often thought
of as "printing" them to the standard output, or the command line), or
"append" members to a pre-existing archive.  All of these operations
can be performed using `tar'.


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