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Chapter 11: Backing Up Data
The -t option lists the names of the files in the archive and the directories they’ll be in
when the archive is unpacked. Adding the -v option increases the verbosity to give
details about each file in the tar archive, including the size of each file and its last
modification time. Here are some example commands:
• To list the files in the archive collection.tar:
$ tar -tf collection.tar
• To list the files in the archive collection.tar.bz2 with extra details:
$ tar -tvjf collection.tar.bz2
To extract the files in collection.tar into the current directory, while preserving
the original permissions:
$ tar -xpf collection.tar
The -x option extracts the files into the current directory. tar works silently
unless the -v option is also used to list the files. The -p option preserves the origi-
nal permissions, so the extracted files will have the same permission settings as
the files that were archived.
• To extract the files in collection.tar.gz into the current directory, while preserv-
ing the original permissions:
$ tar -xpzf collection.tar.gz
• To extract the files in collection.tar.bz2 into the current directory, while preserv-
ing the original permissions:
$ tar -xpjf collection.tar.bz2
• To list and extract the files in collection.tar.bz2 into the current directory, while
preserving the original permissions:
$ tar -xpvjf collection.tar.bz2
A Complete Example of Packing ...