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tar

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tar, or Tape ARchive, is a archiving format and utility first developed for Version 7 Unix in 1977. It's original purpose was to collate files into one that can be stored on tape. Similarly, today it is used to bring many files together into a "tarball", which can be compressed with any general data compression algorithm.

Usage​

note

This guide has been written for GNU tar on linux, however it should be applicable to BSD tar, macOS tar, and the tar command in powershell on Windows.

Create a tar archive​

tar -cf {archive name} {files listed here}

You can use tar to compress your archive, for example into a .tar.gz or .tar.xz archive. To do this, you either can either use a flag such as -z, -j, or -J (gzip, bzip2, xz), or you can use -a ('automatic'), which allows it to intuit what algorithm you want from the file extension, such as archive.tar.xz for an xz compressed tarball.

GNU tar can use these compression algorithms

  • gzip (.gz)
  • bzip2 (.bz)
  • xz (.xz)
  • lzip (.lz)
  • lzma (.lzma)
  • lzop (.lzo)
  • zstd (.zstd)

Extract a tar archive​

tar -xf {tarball}.tar -C {directory to extract to}

tar can extract from it's supported compressed formats, such as archive.tar.xz automatically, with no extra flags.