Linux provides various utilities to compress and combine files, with the tar
command being one of the most commonly used. tar
stands for "tape archive", and is a versatile utility for creating and manipulating compressed archive files. It is a powerful tool that can be used for a variety of tasks, from creating backups of important files to compressing multiple files into a single archive.
The basic syntax of the tar command is as follows:
tar [options] archive_name files_or_directories
Here, options
are the various flags that can be used to modify the behavior of the command, such as -c
for creating a new archive, -x
for extracting files from an archive, and -z
for compressing or decompressing an archive using gzip.
archive_name
is the name of the archive file that will be created or operated on, and files_or_directories
is a list of one or more files or directories that will be included in the archive.
For example, to create a new tarball of a directory called my_folder
, you could use the following command:
tar -czvf my_folder.tar.gz my_folder/
Here, the -c
flag indicates that a new archive should be created, the -z
flag specifies that the archive should be compressed with gzip, the -v
flag enables verbose output so that the user can see which files are being added to the archive, and the f
flag specifies the name of the archive file.
To extract the contents of the tarball, you can use the following command:
tar -xzvf my_folder.tar.gz
Here, the -x
flag indicates that the files should be extracted from the archive, and the other flags have the same meanings as before.
Overall, the tar
command is a versatile and powerful tool that is essential for managing and manipulating archive files in Linux.
Simple Examples
# Create archive.tar from files foo and bar.
tar -cf archive.tar foo bar
# List all files in archive.tar verbosely.
tar -tvf archive.tar
# Extract all files from archive.tar.
tar -xf archive.tar
# Compress directory baz into archive.tar.gz
tar -czvf archive.tar.gz baz/
-c
, --create
create a new archive
-t
, --list
list the contents of an archive
-x
, --extract
, --get
extract files from an archive
-v
, --verbose
verbosely list files processed
-f
, --file=ARCHIVE
use archive file or device ARCHIVE
-z
, --gzip
, --ungzip
use the gzip compression format
Difference between TAR and ZIP files
The tar
file is a file format in itself designed for tape archives. This format can then be compressed using (for example) gzip
or bzip2
compression formats. When you extract a compressed tar
file, you effectively uncompress it, then extract the original files from the uncompressed tar
file.
The zip
tool is a completely different thing. It takes a bunch of files and combines them into a single compressed file. With totally different algorithms.
The tar
tool is just combining several files into a single file without any compression.
The gzip
tool is just compressing a single file.
If you want to have both, you just combine both tools resulting in a .tar.gz
file.
For more info:
Visit the man page for tar
on your shell:
man tar
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