In cases like these, files are not only packed but also compressed with compressors such as gzip or bzip2. What are they? They are still tar files (or tarballs). It is just a way of collecting data of all kinds (files, directories, etc.) together and doesn’t do any kind of compression. The name tar stands for tape archive, and the format was originally developed to save data to tape drives. Compatible with Unix, Unix-like and Microsoft Windows, it is used to collect multiple files into an archive file (which can be called a tarball).
