tar is a computer software utility for collecting many files into one archive file.Tar saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. Normally it used for distribution or backup purposes. It is most popular tool in Linux systems to create compressed archive files.
In this very blog you gonna learn that how to use tar command for data archive and its compression using (tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2).
We gonna use following tar tools.
- Tar
- Gzip
- Bzip2
Create a tar Archive File
So, in following example we gonna create a tar archive file boot.tar for a directory boot in current working directory.
tar -cvf boot.tar -P boot
ls
c – Creates a new .tar archive file.
v – Verbosely show the .tar file progress.
f – File name type of the archive file.
-p Removing leading `/’ from member names
Untar (Un-Compress) Archive File
Now, we gonna un-compress boot.tar archive file in current working directory using follow command
tar -xvf boot.tar boot
Now we will move this directory in desktop as we have compressed boot folder.
mv boot.tar /root/Desktop
So, let say want to un-compress archive in different path or directory. Use -C (Capital C switch) in command and specify your path to uncompress it, Please check below example command.
tar -xvf boot.tar -C /media
ls /media
You can see in above image that boot directory is uncompressed in /media directory.
Create tar.gz Archive File
If you want to compress a file/folder with gzip, then you have to use “z” in tar command and make archive extension as .tar.gz
z – To create a compressed gzip archive file
Run following command
tar -zcvf data.tar.gz data
Un-compress gzip archive file in your desired directory
tar -xvf data.tar.gz -C Desktop
Create tar.bz2 Archive File
The bz2 feature is used to highly compress and create archive. Its archive size is small then gzip archive. The bz2 compression takes more time to compress and decompress files as compared to gzip which takes less time.
j – To create highly compressed tar file, Use following command
tar -cvjSf example.tar.bz2 example
Un-compress bz2 archive file.
tar -xvf example.tar.bz2
Now, un-compress it in another directory
tar -xf example.tar.bz2 -C example
List Content of Archive File
t – it is used to list archive data without extract it.
That’s about it.
