[CamperBob2]

What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all?

I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.

[diggernet]

A tar of gzip or zip files doesn't make sense. But gzipping or zipping a tar does.

Gzip only compresses a single file, so .tar.gz lets you bundle multiple files. You can do the same thing with zip, of course, but...

Zip compresses individual files separately in the container, ignoring redundancies between files. But .tar.gz (and .tar.zip, though I've rarely seen that combination) bundles the files together and then compresses them, so can get better compression than .zip alone.

[beagle3]

The zip directory itself is uncompressed, and if you have lots of small files with similar names, zipping the zip makes a huge difference. IIRC in the HVSC (C64 SID music archive), the outer zip used to save another 30%.

[fullstop]

zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.

[pmarreck]

I think the Mac version may?

[diggernet]

Good point. And if I remember right, tar allows longer paths than zip.

[dns_snek]

Plain old zip is tricky to parse correctly. If you search for them, you can probably find about a dozen rants about all the problems of working with ZIP files.