What is the correct MIME type for a tar.gz file?

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.

1

2 Answers

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).

4

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.

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