things that tar, the standard unix tape archive utility, does not do:
- detect the start or end of a continuous data stream (such as one being read from tape)
- add redundancy or error correction (such as you would use when archiving files)
- skip over corrupted blocks of data (instead it just gives up at the first sign of difficulty)
things tar does:
- puts a bunch of files into one big file and remembers their original filenames for you (you could do this trivially with like 10 lines of code in the scripting tool of your choice)
- compresses files, wait no I lied it actually just uses external utilities to do this anyway, which you could trivially just do yourself with this amazing tool called "piping"
