In some projects, they called torch.save and torch.load with ‘pth.tar’ extension.
I think ‘pth’ is for ‘PyTorcH’, but what is ‘tar’ for…?
Actually I had tried to open ‘pth.tar’ files with Archive Manager and failed 
Just for curious.
Thanks in advance.
.tar refers to tarball and is an archive file.
As far as I know, the legacy serialization module used tarfile.
You can find more information about this file format in the Wikipedia article.
To add some advice you didn’t ask for: I’d recommend to just use .pt as the extension.
As you rightly note it’s been long ago that this used to be a tar file, and pth isn’t particularly compatible with Python’s “.pth” path files (there is an open issue to standardize on .pt in the PyTorch examples).
Best regards
Thomas
Thanks for your replies.
I agree, since it doesn’t seem like we actually need to tar/untar files when we use Pytorch’s save and load_state_dict functions. Hence, it’s just unnecessary overhead to explicitly write out the tar