How do I use the tar command?

Resolution:

The tar command is useful for bundling up multiple files and/or directories. In a sense, it's similar to the zip command. However, zip files are compressed by definition; tar files can be compressed, but don't have to be.

For example, in my home directory I have a file called blank.txt and a directory called stuff. To bundle those two up in a file called bundle.tar without compression you can execute:

tar cvf bundle.tar blank.txt stuff/

The convention is tar [options] filename1 [ filename2, ... filenameN ] directory1 [ directory2, ...directoryN ]. After the archive is created, you can transfer bundle.tar conveniently. Now you want to extract the bundle.tar archive. You can execute:

tar xvf bundle.tar

and you'll get a file called blank.txt and a directory called stuff in your current working directory.

When file size is a concern, adding compression is easy. To have your tar file automatically gzipped, instead of the creating the bundle.tar as above, you can use:

tar czvf bundle.tar.gz blank.txt stuff/

We add 'z' to the tar options and also append '.gz' onto the archive name for convention. To extract a compressed archive, do:

tar xzvf bundle.tar.gz

The tar command knows about another compression algorithm called bzip2. To use bzip2 instead of gzip, replace the 'z' in the previous two commands with a 'j' For example:

tar cjvf bundle.tar.bz2 blank.txt stuff/

tar xjvf bundle.tar.bz2

The tar man pages are an excellent resource for more information about the advanced options of the tar command, type man tar from the command line.