each utitliy is this groput either creates an archive or resotres files from an archive retaining the sytem information about the files

* ar - creates, modifies and extracts files from an archive file on the file system. this is often used to manage programming libraries.

* ranlib - generates an index for an archive

* dump - makes appropiate backup copy archives of files from a file sytem to tape, disk or toher backup medila. files are in standard character format, in an archive, but not compressed

* restore - allows files to be brought back onto the sytem with appropiate owership permissiona and so forth froma dump tape

* tar - read all specified files and direcotry trees and creates a single file archive that is the ame size as the original files, although there is an archive created, no compression takes place, the tar file can be written to media, copied to another file system or compressed with a compression utility. Files can be extracted from the archive, using tar with the -x option or wit cpio

* cpio - copies files into and from cpio or tar files archives

* shar - creates an archive for a directory and all its contents in flas ASCII character format, which cna be mailed and unpacked with /bin/sh. directories, permission owerships and so on survive archving mailing and unpacking.

* rpm2cpio - converts some linux packages (RPM) archives to cpio archives.