A PKG.TAR.ZST file is a software package for Arch Linux. Arch Linux includes a package manager named pacman. Pacman installs programs from installation packages. These packages were once saved as PKG....
A PKG.TAR.ZST file is a software package for Arch Linux. Arch Linux includes a package manager named pacman. Pacman installs programs from installation packages. These packages were once saved as PKG.TAR.XZ files. Now they are PKG.TAR.ZST files. ZST compression makes the packages smaller. Smaller packages are easier to store and share.
Each PKG.TAR.ZST file holds a software package. The package is in a .TAR archive compressed with .ZST. I downloaded packages that had these .tar.zst files inside zip files. Anaconda explained what the files were.
.zst files are common on Linux systems. They combine compression and archiving. This makes smaller files to transfer. zst files offer good compression and fast decompression. Linux and Mac users should know how to extract .zst files. Our guide shows how. It works on Linux or Mac.
To compress a file with zstd, use the zstd command. Add the file name to compress it. This makes a .zst copy of the file. Zstd is fast with good compression. It is good for making small packages to share. I can install a .pkg.tar.zst file on Arch Linux. To install, run pacman with the file name. Then pacman installs it.