Open DAT File

TAR.GZ File

TAR.GZ file format is a format which contains various compressed files merged into one large files. It is somewhat similar to DAT file because DAT files also contain data used by application and this data is frequently consists of multiple pieces of information merged together.

GZ file extension was introduced by Jean-loup Gailly in 1992 to store information in compressed GZIP format. GZIP is a compression algorithm which uses DEFLATE algorithm (which is a combination of LZ77 compression algorithm and Huffman coding). GZIP was developed for Unix operating system to replace compress utility. Compress utility provided great performance but compression ratio was not very good. GZIP with its use of a better LZ77 compression algorithm improved compression ratio but had slower performance. But since computer performance quickly improved GZIP became widely accepted compression format and at some point replaced compress as the best choice of compression on Unix and Linux operating systems.

One major difference between GZIP and other compression utilities is that it can only work on a single file. That is why it required an additional tool in order to work on a multiple files. That’s where TAR utility helped. TAR utility takes multiple files and merges them in a single TAR archive. It is also possible to tell TAR utility to launch GZIP for every file it processes making it compress the data. The resulting TAR.GZ file would contain merged compressed files.

To compress files into TAR.GZ archive following command could be used:

tar -zcvf tar-name.tar.gz source-folder

To decompress resulting archive, you should type following command:

tar -zxvf tar-name.tar.gz

GZIP and TAR are both open source utilities and are available for free. For more details about TAR and GZIP parameters you can read TAR manual and GZIP manual.