Archi Tar

tar -- the GNU archiving utility

Besides the man page (man tar), ther is a much more verbose info manual for the tar untility (info tar).

Creating Archives

• To create a tar archive in the current directory of the files and subdirectories in the current directory: tar -cf arch.tar *

with compression

• To create an archive that is compressed with gzip: tar -czf arch.tar.gz *
• To create an archive that is compressed with bzip2: tar -cjf arch.tar.bz2 *

without leading relative paths

Say you are in /tmp and you want to create an archive of your directory ~/collections/music/project1, but you don't want to see this part of the path in the archive entries:

• To create an archive with files from a different directory, use: tar -cvf arch.tar -C /different/Directory/ .
• Alternatively one could cd /different/Directory/; tar -cvf /directory/for/tar/archive.tar *

Listing archive contents

• use the -t option to list the contents of an archive: tar -tf arch.tar
• if the archive is compressed (eg. arch.tgz, or .tar.bz2), you have to use the respective compression option, e.g. tar -tzf arch.tgz or tar -tjf arch.tar.bz2.