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How To Archive Files on Linux using TAR – Guide

The Linux “tar” stands for tape file, which is used by many Linux/Unix system administrators to up tape drives. The tar command is used to extract a collection of files and directories into a highly compressed archive, commonly referred to as tarball or tar, gzip and bzip in Linux. tar is the most commonly used command to create compressed files that can be easily moved from disk to disk or machine to machine.

In this article, we will cover and discuss the tar command, including creating archives (tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2), extracting archives, extracting a single archive, viewing the contents of the archive, checking an archive, add files or directories to an existing archive, estimate the size of a tar archive, etc. The tar command in Linux is commonly used to create .tar.gz or .tgz files, also called “tarballs”. This command has a large number of options, but you only need to remember a few letters to quickly create files with tar. The tar command can also unzip the created files.

How to archive files in Linux using TAR

How to tar a file on Linux using the command line

The procedure is as follows to tar a file on Linux:

Open the terminal application in Linux

Compress an entire directory by running the command tar -zcvf file.tar.gz /path/to/dir/ on Linux.

To compress a single file by running the command tar -zcvf file.tar.gz /path/to/filename on Linux.

Tar and compress files from multiple directories by running the tar -zcvf file.tar.gz dir1 dir2 dir3 command on Linux.

How to create tar a file in linux

Let’s say you want to compress an entire directory called /home/vivek/data/, type:

$ tar -czvf file.tar.gz /home/vivek/date/

To compress multiple directories and files, run:

$ tar -czvf file.tar.gz /home/vivek/date/ /home/vivek/pics/ /home/vivek/.accounting.db

You can use bzip2 compression instead of gzip by passing the -j option to the tar command:

$ tar -cjvf file.tar.bz2 /home/vivek/date/

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