tar — Create/Add/Extract Tape ARchives files.
Summary:
tar is an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tar file. A tar file may be made on a tape drive, however, it is also common to write a tar file to a normal file.
Normally “.tar” file is not a compressed file. It is actually a collection of files within a single file.
“.tar.gz”/ “.tgz” is a collection of files which are compressed. You can also use BZip2 compresion for the tar files.
Example:
$ tar -cf myfile.tar mydir — Create new tar file.
$ tar -cvf myfile.tar mydir — With detail output.
$ tar -tvf myfile.tar — List the content of the tar file.
$ tar -uvf myfile.tar mydir — Update/Append files that are newer than copy in tar.
$ tar -xvf myfile.tar — Extract the tar file.
$ tar -xvf myfile.tar dir1/file1 — Extract only file1 from the tar.
$ tar –delete -vf myfile.tar *.doc — Delete all files with .doc extn from tar file.
$ tar –diff -vf myfile.tar mydir — Differences between archive & mydir
$ tar -czvf myfile.tgz mydir — Tar and GZip the files.
$ tar -xzvf myfile.tgz — Extract the tgz file.
$ tar -cZvf myfile.tgz mydir — Tar and compress the files.
$ tar -xZvf myfile.tgz — Extract the tgz file.
Read: man tar