To quickly create an archive of disparate files, which utility should you use?

The most appropriate utility for quickly creating an archive of disparate files is tar. The tar (short for Tape Archive) command is widely used in Linux and Unix-like operating systems for archiving multiple files into a single file, making it easier to manage and transfer. One of the key features of tar is that it can accept multiple files as input and package them into one archive file, typically with a .tar extension.

While cpio is another archive utility, it is generally used for creating archives that can be extracted in a more specific manner, often in conjunction with another utility like find for more complex file selections. It is not as commonly used for ad-hoc archiving of arbitrary files compared to tar.

The zip utility is primarily focused on compression and archiving in one step but is more frequently used in the context of inter-platform file sharing. Gzip, on the other hand, is specifically designed for file compression rather than archiving, and it generally works best for single files rather than a collection of disparate files.

Thus, for quickly creating a straightforward archive of various files, tar is the utility that is most suited for this purpose because it seamlessly handles creating an archive from multiple sources while maintaining their metadata.