tarball
also: tar archive, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2
A tarball is a compressed archive file created by the tar command, typically with a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 extension, used to bundle multiple files and directories into a single distributable package.
A tarball combines the tar (tape archive) utility with compression to create a single file containing an entire directory structure. The name comes from the original .tar format used on tape drives, which is then typically compressed using gzip (.gz) or bzip2 (.bz2) to reduce file size.
Tarballs are the standard way to distribute source code and software in the Linux ecosystem. For example, a project might release myapp-1.0.tar.gz containing the source code, documentation, and build files. Users can extract it with tar -xzf myapp-1.0.tar.gz to access all the contents.
Common tarball extensions include .tar.gz (gzip-compressed), .tar.bz2 (bzip2-compressed), and .tar.xz (xz-compressed). They preserve file permissions, ownership, and directory hierarchies, making them ideal for packaging complete software distributions.