Skip to content

tar

Archiving utility (https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/)

To check tar version

tar --version

To extract an uncompressed archive

tar -xvf <archive.tar>

To extract an archive into a specific destination directory

tar -xvf <archive.tar> -C <destination_directory>

To create an uncompressed archive

tar -cvf <archive.tar> <source_directory>

To extract a gzip compressed archive (.tar.gz or .tgz)

tar -xzvf <archive.tar.gz>

To create a gzip compressed archive (.tar.gz or .tgz)

tar -czvf <archive.tar.gz> <source_directory>

To list the contents of a gzip compressed archive

tar -tzvf <archive.tar.gz>

To extract a bzip2 compressed archive (.tar.bz2)

tar -xjvf <archive.tar.bz2>

To create a bzip2 compressed archive (.tar.bz2)

tar -cjvf <archive.tar.bz2> <source_directory>

To list the contents of a bzip2 compressed archive

tar -tjvf <archive.tar.bz2>

To create a gzip archive excluding specific extensions

tar -czvf <archive.tar.gz> --exclude=\*.{jpg,gif,png,zip} <source_directory>

To use multi-threaded compression algorithms (via pigz, pbzip2, pixz)

tar -Ipigz -cvf <archive.tar.gz> <source_directory>
tar -Ipbzip2 -cvf <archive.tar.bz2> <source_directory>
tar -Ipixz -cvf <archive.tar.xz> <source_directory>

To append a new file to an existing uncompressed tar archive

tar -rf <archive.tar> <file_to_append>