Tarfile

Tar is a traditional archive format used on Unix-like systems to collect multiple files and directories into a single file. A tar archive preserves file metadata such as permissions, ownership, modification times, and directory structure, but does not compress data by itself. To reduce size, tar archives are commonly compressed with external programs, producing files with extensions such as .tar.gz or .tgz (gzip), .tar.bz2 (bzip2), or .tar.xz (xz).

Tar archives are created and extracted with the tar utility, for example tar -cvf archive.tar dir to create, and tar -xvf archive.tar to extract. Compression is enabled by adding options such as -z for gzip, -j for bzip2, or -J for xz, often in combination with the -a auto-detect option.

Tarfile is the Python standard library module that provides read and write access to tar archives. It supports uncompressed and compressed tar files, including gzip, bz2, and xz variants, and can auto-detect compression with mode 'r:*'. The API includes TarFile objects and methods such as add, addfile, extract, extractall, getmembers, and getnames. It can also operate on file-like objects. For streaming, you can pass a file-like object as the archive source; for writing, you specify a mode like 'w:gz' or 'w:xz'.

Security and portability notes: extracting archives can pose risks if the archive contains files with absolute paths or paths that escape the target directory. When using tarfile, prefer extractall with a target path and/or implement a safe extraction routine that validates paths. tar and tarfile are widely used for backups, software distributions, and data transfer, and remain compatible across many Unix-like systems and Python versions.