TAR

Linux TARBALL

TAR is an acronym for Tape Archive, and is a very common format for combining multiple files / folders into a single file. Often it is done with gzip to provide compression as well.

Create a TAR file

tar -zpcvf archivename.tar.gz directoryName

Where

• -z: Compress archive using gzip program
• -j: Compress archive using bz2 algorythm (smaller filesize, but takes longer)
• -c: Create archive
• -v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
• -f: Archive File name
• -p: preserve the permissions

Extract a TAR file

tar -xvf archivename.tar.gz -C directoryName

Where

• -x: Extract files
• -v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
• -f: Archive File name
• -C: Change directory (an error will occur if the directory does not exist)

-z or -j is not required anymore because tar will automatically decompress the file. It will decompress gz files and bz2 files automatically.

You can omit the -C directoryName, and the file will automatically be extracted to the folder that was named during the initial tarball process.

List contents of a TAR file

tar -tvf archivename.tar.gz

Extract a single file

It is also possible to extract just a single file from the tarball. Simply provide the filename with the tar command. Note, you will need to supply the path to the file!

tar -xvf archivename.tar.gz path_to_file/filename

Now you’ll be able to go to the directory and see your single file that you extracted.