Outside of this specific "quine" experiment, R.tar.gz is a common filename in other technical areas:
: The archive uses the properties of the DEFLATE algorithm and the way zip/tar headers work to point back to the beginning of the file, essentially creating a loop. Common Technical Contexts R.tar.gz
: For "die-hard Unix fans," Cox explains r.tar.gz , a gzipped tarball that contains another r.tar.gz inside it. Outside of this specific "quine" experiment, R
: It is the standard format for the source code of the R programming language (e.g., R-4.3.1.tar.gz ) found on CRAN . : Just as a program quine prints its
: Just as a program quine prints its own source code, these files contain their own compressed representation.
The phrase most likely refers to a famous blog post by Russ Cox titled "Zip Files All The Way Down," which explores the concept of a self-reproducing archive, or a decompression quine . The Recursive Archive Concept
In his post, Russ Cox demonstrates how to create a file that, when unpacked, contains a file identical to itself. This creates an infinite loop of extraction: