DoD wierdness

[Armalite]

Anybody have any idea what a .tar file is? Somebody found one here:



http://cst-www.nrl.navy.mil/~boyer/scad/



Seems to be a bunch of mathematical gibberish, but I doubt notepad is the proper prog to view the file with.[/url]

[Stone]

Isn't a .tar file a compressed linux file?

[Armalite]

So what would one use to view it?

[phoenix]

Tar files are Tape ARchive files commonly used in Unix/Linux based systems to group a number of files together. They are not zipped as such as no compression takes place when a tar file is created.

Anther common extension would include filename.tgz, which would be a compressed tar file.

So what would one use to view it?
Unix/Linux has certain commands to handle compressing/uncompressing tar and tgz files however on a Windows based machine Winzip should be able to open both file types however it can't create them.

The files inside the archive however could be for anything.

As it turns out the tar file in the site you mentioned contains a bunch of PostScript graphs. You can open them in Paint Shop Pro 7.

[orionnt]

WinRar will open tar files, and most other linux/unix archives in windows for you.