Linux TAR Command

Quick Start: Here we’l present quick start examples explained.

Create linux tar gz (Gzip) archive

tar -czvf myarchive.tgz mydirectory/

We use the -t option to create an linux tar archive
-c, –create create a new archive

Note that .tgz is the same thing as .tar.gz

Create linux simple tar archive (withouth compresion)

tar -cvf myarchive.tar mydirectory/

Extracting linux tar archive:

Extract linux tar gz (Gzip) archive
tar -xzvf mystuff.tgz

Extract linux simple tar archive
tar -xvf mystuff.tar

We use -x to extract the files form the tar archive
-x, –extract, –get extract files from an archive

Extract linux tar archive to speciefied directory
tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz -C /desired/path

And now let us shortly explain this command

Usage: tar [OPTION]… [FILE]…

Let us check the option used in this example

-c, –create                      create a new archive
-z, –gzip, –ungzip        filter the archive through gzip
-v, –verbose                   verbosely list files processed
-f, –file=ARCHIVE          use archive file or device ARCHIVE

-C directory file
Performs a chdir  operation on directory and performs the c (create) or r (replace) operation on file .
In c and r mode, this changes the directory before adding the following files. In x mode, change directories after opening the archive but before extracting entries from the archive.

Testing / viewing your archive

tar -tvf myarchive.tar
tar -tzvf myarchive.tgz

Here we used the – t opton
-t, –list                           list the contents of an archive

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Go ahead, try out these commands and stay tuned; we will come up with more doccumentation on linux tar command

Tags: Linux, Linux Commands, tar, tar.gz