File archiver

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In computing, a file archiver is utility software that combines files into a single archive file – or in less common cases, multiple files.

A minimally designed archiver might concatenate the content of files along with file name and length. A more advanced archiver stores additional metadata, such as the timestamps, file attributes and access control information. An archiver might compress input file content to reduce the size of the resulting archive.

The process of making an archive file is called archiving or packing. Reconstructing the original files from an archive is called unarchiving, unpacking or extracting.