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What is a JAR File?
JAR stands for Java Archive, and, as you may very well assume from this, it is a package file that is meant to aggregate Java class files, associated metadata, but also text, images, and other resources in a single file.
Naturally, this will make distribution much easier, but the same can’t be said for decompressing files that come in this format. For instance, if you want to extract JAR file Mac might not be the easiest PC to do it on. But it’s also not that complicated, and in the following rows we will show you the best ways to do it.
To conclude, JAR files are archives that are quite similar to the classic ZIP files, but they run on Java Runtime Environment. What makes them distinct is the manifest – a unique metafile containing information about the files from the archive, which controls how the JAR file behaves.
