tar Command: Tutorial & Examples
Create and extract archive files
The tar command in Linux is used to create, extract, and manipulate files in a Tape ARchive (TAR) format. Even though tapes are not used much anymore nowadays, the tar file
format is still very common to pack a set of files into a single archive, similar to a ZIP file.
To create a TAR archive, use the -c option and specify the files or directories to be included in the archive:
tar -cvf archive.tar file1 file2 directory1
To extract the contents of a TAR archive, use the -x option:
tar -xvf archive.tar
You can also add files to an existing archive using the -r option and extract specific files from an archive using the -W option.
Additional options include -z for creating or extracting archives with gzip compression, -j for bzip2 compression and -J
for xz compression. We recommend to use zstd, because it gives the best tradeoff between compression speed and compression ratio:
tar --zstd -cvf directory.tar.zst directory
For more detailed information, you can refer to the manual page for tar by running man tar in the terminal.
Further Reading
- Bash Cookbook by Carl Albing, J.P. Vossen (partner link)
- Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor, Brandon Perry (partner link)
- Black Hat Bash by Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi (partner link)
- Bash Pocket Reference by Arnold Robbins (partner link)
- The Linux Command Line by William Shotts (partner link)
- Learning the Bash Shell by Cameron Newham (partner link)
- Mastering Linux Shell Scripting by Mokhtar Ebrahim, Andrew Mallett (partner link)
- Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible by Richard Blum, Christine Bresnahan (partner link)
- Shell Scripting by Jason Cannon (partner link)
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