Resolution:
The tar command is useful for bundling up multiple files and/or directories. In a sense, it's similar to the zip command. However, zip files are compressed by definition; tar files can be compressed, but don't have to be.
For example, in my home directory I have a file called blank.txt and a directory called stuff. To bundle those two up in a file called bundle.tar without compression you can execute:
When file size is a concern, adding compression is easy. To have your tar file automatically gzipped, instead of the creating the bundle.tar as above, you can use:
For example, in my home directory I have a file called blank.txt and a directory called stuff. To bundle those two up in a file called bundle.tar without compression you can execute:
The convention is tar [options] filename1 [ filename2, ... filenameN ] directory1 [ directory2, ...directoryN ]. After the archive is created, you can transfer bundle.tar conveniently. Now you want to extract the bundle.tar archive. You can execute:tar cvf bundle.tar blank.txt stuff/
and you'll get a file called blank.txt and a directory called stuff in your current working directory.tar xvf bundle.tar
When file size is a concern, adding compression is easy. To have your tar file automatically gzipped, instead of the creating the bundle.tar as above, you can use:
We add 'z' to the tar options and also append '.gz' onto the archive name for convention. To extract a compressed archive, do:tar czvf bundle.tar.gz blank.txt stuff/
The tar command knows about another compression algorithm called bzip2. To use bzip2 instead of gzip, replace the 'z' in the previous two commands with a 'j' For example:tar xzvf bundle.tar.gz
The tar man pages are an excellent resource for more information about the advanced options of the tar command, type man tar from the command line.tar cjvf bundle.tar.bz2 blank.txt stuff/
tar xjvf bundle.tar.bz2