Linux tar Command and How To Tar A Directory – POFTUT

Generally used to make multiple files and directories one file. We will tar a directory

$ tar cvf dymerge.tar dymerge 
dymerge/ 
dymerge/txt/ 
dymerge/txt/archive_formats.txt 
dymerge/txt/logo.txt

c for compress but actually it is not compressed
v for verbosity to see what happens
f for archive file name
dymerge.tar is new tar file name
dymerge is the source directory name

Compress While Archiving

We can compress archived with with z parameter. z is used to gzip format

$ tar cvfz dymerge.tar.gz dymerge

z is for gzip compression other options are default for our usage

To compress with bzip2 j parameter should be provided.

List Files in Tar Archive

We can list files without opening the tar. t parameter is used to list. But if the archive is gzip we should provide z too. As we see tar.gz is extension for tarred and gzipped files.

$ tar tvfz dymerge.tar.gz

t list files
z archive is gzip format

If the archive is bzip2 we can use following command

$ tar tvfj dymerge.tar.gz

Extract Single File From Archive

With tar a single file can be extracted from archive. x is the parameter to be used for this operation

$ tar xvfz  dymerge.tar.gz dymerge/surnames.txt 
dymerge/surnames.txt

dymerge.tar.gz is our archive that contains our single file
dymerge/surnames.txt is the file we want to extract

Extract Multiple Files From Archive with tar

We can extract multiple files with tar. We need too provide –wildcards parameter and related files for this. Here * is used for globing

$ tar xvfz  dymerge.tar.gz --wildcards *.txt  
dymerge/txt/archive_formats.txt 
dymerge/txt/logo.txt 
dymerge/surnames.txt 
dymerge/vbscan/reports/forum.doom9.org/forum.doom9.org_report_2016-10-16_at_4.56.1.txt 
dymerge/vbscan/reports/hello.txt 
dymerge/vbscan/love.txt 
dymerge/vbscan/exploit/vbscandb.txt 
dymerge/dymerged.txt 
dymerge/names.txt

–wildcards is the parameter
*.txt is the file names we want to exract

Untar Command

We can create some alias to create new untar command like below.

$ export alias untar="tar dvf $1"

Adding File into Archive

After creating an archive we may need to update or add new files and folders to the existing archive. We can use r option to add new file or folder by specifying file and folder names at the end of the command like below. In this example we will add file named test.txtinto the existing archive named dymerge.tar.gz

$ tar rvfz  dymerge.tar.gz test.txt

We append test.txt file with r option
We can add directories too

Estimate Archive Size

Before archiving a directory with tar command we can learn the size of the archive with the help of wc command. We will tar the directory in to the starndard output which will be redirected to the wc command. wc command will count the bytes and provide estimated size of the given archived file.

$ tar -cf - dymerge | wc -c 
573440

Linux tar Command and How To Tar A Directory Infografic

Java Qui Nhon