short form of the name, "tape archive," the command to create a [tarball]. also a [tcllib] module for reading and writing tarballs. documentation is at [http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/doc/tar.html]

''There's code to decode and unpack a tar file in the [SDX] starkit utility, unwrap and look at lib/app-sdx/tgz2kit.tcl, it's about 25 lines.'' - [jcw]

The sdx untar does not respect file permissions and owners, nor special files.
[LV] what does ''respect'' mean - that it does not set these values on files being extracted?
Or that it ignores the local directory information and just writes things out? - It does not set owner/group or permissions on the files being extracted and does not create special files such as hard and soft links.

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[LV] Something I recently learned about the tar package in tcllib - 
we ran into a case where until Feb, 2007, the tar files created by the tar
package occasionally didn't include all the files it should.
This has been fixed, but the code hasn't, yet, been included in a formal
tcllib release.

Anyways, during the testing of that, I discovered that the GNU tar program
creates larger tar files than the non-GNU tar program that comes in
Sun Solaris or the Tcl tar package in tcllib. For that matter, the
Solaris and the Tcl tar package create different tar files for the same
data, but the size of the tar package is the same in this latter case.
Just wanted to warn people to expect the unexpected...
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[DKF]: Tar is also, and coincidentally, a black sticky substance that traps stuff that falls into it (e.g. the La Brea Tar Pits in LA). In computing, this brings on the term "a tar-pit project", which sucks in all effort that goes even close and swallows it all without trace. Avoid tar pits by using [Tcl/Tk]!

[LV] I've tended to refer to this type of effort as a ''black hole''.  I've also heard it referred to as a ''tar baby'' (which refers back to old children's tales of Brer Rabbit and company [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/remus/tar-baby.html].

[ECS]: The first reference I know to "a tar-pit project" is from Fred Brooks' '''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering''' [http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0201835959] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month].

[GWM] I've also called these 'bucket of worms' projects - every time you move one layer another one slithers into view.  Similar: 'a box of frogs' (originally referring to the way 5-10 year old boys leap about - imagine opening a shoe box with frogs in, out they all come).

''[escargo] 13 Feb 2007'' - Another tar-pit is the ''Turing tar-pit,'' where everything is possible,
but nothing is easy. [http://computing-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Turing+tar-pit] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit]
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[Category Package]