Which tool would you use to create an archive of files?

The tool used to create an archive of files is tar. The tar command, short for "tape archive," is specifically designed for collecting many files into a single file, which is especially useful for storage and distribution. This is commonly employed in backup procedures and for packaging files before transferring them over a network or to other systems.

Using tar, you can create an archive by specifying the files or directories you want to include and the destination for the archive file, typically ending with a .tar extension. For added functionality, tar can also compress the archive using options like gzip or bzip2, resulting in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 files.

The other tools mentioned are not suited for creating archives. dpkg is a package management tool used for managing .deb packages in Debian-based systems, apt is a higher-level package management tool that utilizes dpkg to handle software installation and updates, and yum (Yellowdog Updater Modified) is used for managing packages in RPM-based distributions like Red Hat and CentOS. These tools focus on package management, not file archiving.