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.