AR


 * For another "ar" format, see ar (Haruhiko Okumura).

ar is a non-compressed archive format for Unix-style operating systems. It was mostly superseded by tar for general archiving use, but persists in use for specialized applications involving linkable libraries for development.

Overview
There are at least 5 different variants of the ar file format since it has never been formally standardized: AIX(big), AIX(small), Coherent, BSD, and GNU.

Examples
To list the contents of an archive, using the  utility: $ ar tv example.a

To extract the contents of an archive: $ ar xvo example.a

Software

 * GNU Binutils → ar
 * llvm-ar

Sample files

 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/archive/arArchive/