May 15, 2003

tarball

n.

[very common; prob. based on the tar baby in the Uncle Remus folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar1 utility, containing myriad related files. Here, I'll just ftp you a tarball of the whole project. Tarballs have been the standard way to ship around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s; in retrospect it seems odd that this term did not enter common usage until the late 1990s.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:27 AM

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