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What is the correct MIME type for a tar.gz file?
I've searched around and found several values being used, including:
application/x-gzip
application/x-gtar
application/x-tgz
But I could find no indication as to which of these (if any) was the correct or canonical value.
As of August 2012, the MIME type recommended in RFC 6713 is application/gzip.
According to the IANA registry, tar is not an official media type, so a GZipped tar file is officially only a compressed file.
Hypothetically, if a tarball were an official media type and following conventions, its MIME type would be application/tar (file extension .tar) and its compressed version would be application/tar+gzip (file extensions .tar.gz and .tgz).
application/zip is a different format than application/gzip and tar.gz is a gzipped tarball; Zip uses multiple compression methods, not all of which are freely licensed. Perhaps you got lucky and your decompression library recognizes both formats from their data stream.
Mar 7, 2017 at 16:58
tar is not an official media type, would that not make application/x-tar+gzip the most correct? I feel that would be more clear even if it's less... official.
application/x-xz-compressed-tar. But that's not super useful as the Nautilus file picker doesn't obey non-standard mime types... the ones with "x-". In practice for HTML forms, you'd use extensions in the accept field for non standard types.
Although most are deprecated, they are all technically correct, just different MIME types.
The correct MIME type is application/x-gzip according to cPanel standards.
application/x-gzip, It got corrupted. But when I used application/gzip , it worked.
Dec 4, 2016 at 16:15
application/x-gzip and application/tar+gzip produced corrupted files, whereas application/gzip worked.