I have a directory I’m archiving:
$ du -sh oldcode
1400848
$ tar cf oldcode.tar oldcode
So the directory is 1.4gb. The file is significantly smaller, though:
$ ls -l oldcode.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 ieure ieure 940339200 2002-01-30 10:33 oldcode.tar
Only 897mb. It’s not compressed in any way:
$ file oldcode.tar
oldcode.tar: POSIX tar archive
Why is the tar file smaller than it’s contents?