tarball

n. [very common; prob. based on the tar baby in the Uncle Remus folk tales]
An archive, created with the Unix tar (1) utility, containing myriad related
files. Here, I'll just ftp you a tarball of the whole project. Tarballs have
been the standard way to ship around source-code distributions since the
mid-1980s; in retrospect it seems odd that this term did not enter common
usage until the late 1990s.