Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
41 lines (34 loc) · 1.87 KB

tar.mdwn

File metadata and controls

41 lines (34 loc) · 1.87 KB
Raw

Manages tar archives

A tar archive is a file collection represented by a single "tar" file. They're used for backups and distributing collections of files. The files comprising a software package are often offered for download as tar archives.

Creating Archives

Note: In all of the following examples the tar archive being created will be overwritten if it already exists.

  • tar -cvf file.tar dir/ - Create a tar archive called file.tar that contains the contents of directory dir/.
  • tar -cvf ~/pictures.tar ~/Photos/*.png - Create a tar archive called pictures.tar in the user's home directory containing the .png files in the their ~/Photos directory.
  • tar -cjvf file.tar.bz2 dir/ - Creates a tar archive called file.tar.bz2 which contains dir/ and is compressed with bzip2.
  • tar -czvf file.tar.gz dir/ - Creates a tar archive called file.tar.gz which contains dir/ and is compressed with gzip.

Extracting Archives

  • tar -xzvf file.tar.gz - Extract the contents of gzipped tar archive file.tar.gz into the current directory. In this example the tar archive has been compressed with gzip, so we use the -z switch to indicate that it should be uncompressed with gzip before extracting its contents.
  • tar -xjvf file.tar.bz2 - As above, but this time the archive has been compressed with bzip2, so the -j switch is used to uncompress it.

Listing Archives

  • tar -tvf file.tar - Lists the files and directories contained within file.tar.
  • tar -tzvf file.tar.gz - Lists the files and directories contained within the gzip'd file.tar.gz.

Adding to Archives

Note: tar cannot update compressed archives, so in this case you'll need to extract the archive, add the new files to the same directory, then create a new archive.

  • tar -rvf file.tar file2 - Appends file2 to the tar archive file.tar, i.e. add a new file to an existing archive.