Dotan Cohen wrote:
KDE gives users three options to compress folders: tar, zip, and rar. What are the advantages or disadvantages of each? How do I know which one to use?
tar is not compression, it's an archive (tar = Tape ARchive). You generally zip tarballs with either bzip (*.tar.bz) or gzip (*.tar.gz or *.tgz). I don't know if KDE defaults to one of these.
If you're sending files to people, in general, a *nixy user will be expecting a zipped tarball, most Windows Users will be expecting a zip archive. More 'power' windows users will be expecting .rars.
Zip is probably the most widely-supported, but not always installed by default on Linux distros. I've never found a [b|g]zipped tarball to be particularly lacking.
-- Avi Greenbury http://aviswebsite.co.uk ;) http://aviswebsite.co.uk/asking-questions