Question

Linux

What is the tar command?

a. Can you compress files using tar? Please explain how and provide a brief example.

b. How do you create a tar file? Please provide an example.

c. How do you extract files in a tar format? Please provide an example.

Answer 1

Q Answer

#The tar command is used to create, maintain, modify and extract files which are archived in the tar format.

The tar stands for tape archive and it is an archiving file format just like a zip file. The tar command in Linux is one of the important command which provides archiving functionality in Linux. It allows us to quickly access a collection of files and placed them into a highly compressed archive file commonly called tarball, or tar, gzip, and bzip in Linux. The algorithm used for compressing of .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 are gzip or bzip algorithms respectively.

# To compress file using tar following command is used

tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file.

-c: Create an archive.
-z: Compress the archive with gzip.
-v: Display progress in the terminal while creating the archive, also known as “verbose” mode. The v is always optional in these commands, but it’s helpful.
-f: Allows you to specify the filename of the archive.

# how to create tar file in Linux using command line

procedure

1. Open the terminal app in Linux
2. Compress an entire directory by running tar -zcvf file.tar.gz /path/to/dir/ command in Linux
3. Compress a single file by running tar -zcvf file.tar.gz /path/to/filename command in Linux
4. Compress multiple directories file by running tar -zcvf file.tar.gz dir1 dir2 dir3 command in Linux

# how to extract file in tar format

If You want to extract the contents of the archive to a specific directory.
You can do so by appending the -C switch to the end of the command.
For example, the following command will extract the contents of the archive.tar.gz file to the /tmp directory.
tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz -C /tmp