In a previous post, “How To Compress Multiple Files Using GZip In C# & .NET”, we looked at how to compress multiple files using gzip compression, during which we observed that it is not in fact possible to compress multiple files using gzip, as it only supports a single file.

Therefore to compress the files you need to process them into an intermediate format that is a single file, the tar.

What you may not realize that there are in fact multiple types of tar:

In .NET 10, you always got the Pax format, given there was no way to specify a format.

The code was as follows:

await TarFile.CreateFromDirectoryAsync("/source/", "/target/archive.tar",
    includeBaseDirectory: true);

In .NET 11, you can specify the format that you want using the new overload for CreateFromDirectory and CreateFromDirectoryAsync, specifying the format that you want with the format parameter that takes a TarEntryFormat enum.

Name Value Description
Unknown 0 Tar entry format undetermined.
V7 1 1979 Version 7 AT&T Unix tar entry format.
Ustar 2 POSIX IEEE 1003.1-1988 Unix Standard tar entry format.
Pax 3 POSIX IEEE 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”) Pax Interchange tar entry format.
Gnu 4 GNU tar entry format (gnu).

Your code would this look like this:

await TarFile.CreateFromDirectoryAsync("/source/", "/target/archive.tar",
    includeBaseDirectory: true, format: TarEntryFormat.Gnu);

TLDR

When creating tar archives, you can now specify the format in .NET 11.

Happy hacking!