Sunday, July 24, 2011

TAR command usgae in Linux/Unix

The tar command stands for "tape archive". It is the "standard" way to read and write archives (collections of files and whole directory trees).

Often you will find archives of stuff with names like stuff.tar, or stuff.tar.gz.  This is stuff in a tar archive, and stuff in a tar archive which has been compressed using the
gzip compression program respectively.

Chances are that if someone gives you a tape written on a UNIX system, it will be in tar format, and you will use tar (and your tape drive) to read it.

Likewise, if you want to write a tape to give to someone else, you should probably use tar as well.

Tar examples:

tar xv      Extracts (x) files from the default tape drive while listing (v = verbose) the file names to the screen.

tar tv      Lists the files from the default tape device without extracting them.

tar cv file1 file2  Write files 'file1' and 'file2' to the default tape device.

tar cvf archive.tar file1 [file2...]   Create a tar archive as a file "archive.tar" containing file1, file2...etc.

tar xvf archive.tar  extract from the archive file

tar cvfz archive.tar.gz dname   Create a gzip compressed tar archive containing everything in the directory 'dname'. This does not work with all versions of tar.

tar xvfz archive.tar.gz  Extract a gzip compressed tar archive.  Does not work with all versions of tar.

tar cvfI archive.tar.bz2 dname Create a bz2 compressed tar archive. Does not work with all versions of tar

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