Linux System Administration

tar Archives

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-p

Preserve file permissions.

-t

List the files in an existing archive.

-v

When creating or unpacking archives, list the contents. With the -t option, pro-

vide more detail about the listed files.

-x

Extract (read) files from an existing archive.

-z

Compress or uncompress the archive using gzip or gunzip. Archives compressed

with gzip usually have the .gz suffix.

Creating a New Archive

You can create a tar archive just to save a group of files for your own archiving pur-

poses, to send them to someone else by email, or to make them available to the pub-

lic (for example, on an FTP server). Some typical commands to archive the directory

work-docs are as follows:

• To create the archive work-docs.tar from the directory work-docs:

$ tar -cf work-docs.tar work-docs

• To create the compressed archive work-docs.tar.gz from the directory work-docs:

$ tar -czf work-docs.tar.gz work-docs

• To create the compressed archive work-docs.tar.bz2 from the directory work-docs:

$ tar -cjf work-docs.tar.bz2 work-docs

Extracting from an Archive

At different times, you may need to extract files from an archive you created earlier

(such as a backup), from an archive someone has mailed to you, or from an archive

you have downloaded from the Internet (say, the source code for some software you

need).

Before you extract an archive, you should list and review its contents. You don’t

want to accidentally replace existing ...