https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

ar, short for archiver, is a shell command for maintaining multiple files as a single archive file (i.e. a file archiver). It is often used to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating deb format packages for the Debian Linux distribution. It can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries.

Originally developed for Unix, the command is widely available on Unix-based systems, and similar commands are available on other platforms. An implementation is included in GNU Binutils.