Creating an archive using the ‘tar’ command

Using the tar command

To tar all .a and .b files into a tar file named ab.tgz use:

    tar -cvzf ab.tgz *.a *.b

This creates (c) a compressed (z) tar file named ab.tgz (f) and shows the files being stored into the tar file (v). The .tgz suffix is a convention for gzipped tar files.

To archive a full directory testdir into test.tgz:

   tar -cvzf testdir.tgz testdir

tar command options

• c — to create a tar file, writing the file starts at the beginning.
• t — table of contents, see the names of all files or those specified in other command line arguments.
• x — extract (restore) the contents of the tar file.

• f — specifies the filename (which follows the f) used to tar into or to tar out from; see the examples below.
• z — use zip/gzip to compress the tar file or to read from a compressed tar file.
• v — verbose output, show, e.g., during create or extract, the files being stored into or restored from the tar file.

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