Which program is not used for archiving?

Question

Which program is not used for archiving ?

Gzip, tar, cpio or zip ?

I thought cpio is used to copy files from the archive that is why i am a little confused. Out of the four programs which one is not used for archiving or is it a trick question? to be honest i have a homework and i a not sure what the answer is..

Thanks

I think I'd use any of them for archiving, depending on the situation. cpio is somewhat long in the tooth, but still around and working "mostly satisfactorily". — Chris Davies, Dec 21 '15 at 14:44

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 21 '15 at 12:33

2

To answer this question, you have to consider the two aspects in which these four tools can be involved:

file archiving
file compression

You have to find out which utility can not be used to provide an archive file.

answered Dec 21 '15 at 12:33

uloBasEI

3,047

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 21 '15 at 13:43

I'd say that's (your teacher's) a dumb, ambiguous and poorly worded question.

tar, zip and and cpio are probably the ones meant to be the archiving ones as they create files that can contain an archive with several files (with their content, path and metadata) in them.

gzip is only meant for compression, so can store only one content by itself. It does store the original file name (not path) and some metadata though. So it could still be considered as an archiver but whose archives can only store one member.

You can also concatenate gz files (though generally only the first file name is easily retrievable). It's also used for archiving in that it's typically used to compress the output of tar.

Thank you. I think the answer is Gzip. When i receive my results i will share :) — redcaddy, Dec 21 '15 at 18:22

Which program is not used for archiving?

2 Answers2