tar itself does not write down a checksum for later comparsion. If you gzip the tar archive you can have that functionality. tar uses compress . If you use the -Z flag while creating the archive tar will use the compress program when reading or writing the archive.

Is a tar file binary?

A tar archive file contains a series of blocks. ... At the end of the archive file there are two 512-byte blocks filled with binary zeros as an end-of-file marker. A reasonable system should write such end-of-file marker at the end of an archive, but must not assume that such a block exists when reading an archive.

Does tar have a limit?

There are varying reports to the maximum file-size that tar can support, but it appears that it was originally 2GB, later extended to 8GB, and most recently extended to 68 GB. Admitadly these numbers are based on non-GNU documentation, because I can't find much in the way of documentation.