Tar for python? Better compressed file archives 'r us?

[Erik Max Francis]

Richard Jones wrote:

> Does anyone have tar written in python? I've just compared the
> difference
> between a .zip and .tgz of the same directory structure, and the sizes
> are:
> 
> -rw-rw-r--    1 builder  builder   3796376 Dec 17 15:39 zope.zip
> -rw-rw-r--    1 builder  builder   2270562 Dec 17 15:55 zope.tgz

That's really zope.tar.gz; it's a gzip'ed tar file.  Under UNIX we
consider collecting a bunch of files into one (tar) and compressing them
(compress or gzip) as two separate operations.

I don't know if there's tar functionality available for Python; if not,
simple concatenation of files with a tiny header at the end would be
relatively straightforward.  There _is_, however, support for gzip in
Python; try the gzip module.

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