Linux System Administration

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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 ...