No matter in Linux, windows or other platforms, file compression is essential in system management aspect. The file compression programs and utilities can help you to reduce the file size signicantly. As a result, it can help your corporation to save the system disk space usage and the server hardware cost.

In Linux environment, the tar command one of the most important commands used to create the archive file. That means you can use the tar command to compress and bundle one or multiple files into an archive file. On the other hand, you will use the tar command to extract and uncompressed the bundled archive file to the original files.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the "tar" command to create and extract archive files with different options. We will walkthrough the "tar" command with detailed explantions and examples.

The tar Command Syntax

Before going into the detail "tar" command, we will show you the basic syntax of the Linux tar command:

The tar command options

-c: create a new archive file
-x: extract from the archive file
-z: use the gzip compression to create a tar file
-v: this option will print the verbose information as output
-f: this option specifies the file name of the archive file
-t: this will list all the files inside the archive file
-j: create an archive file using the bzip2 compression
-r: this option helps to add file to a archive file

How to create an archive file

In the following example, we want to bundle 3 txt files into a single tar archive file named: "test", we will issue the command:



Let's look into the details of the command option:

means create the archive file

means using the gzip compression

will print out the detials of the files that has been archived on the terminal means specifing the archive file name to be: "test.tar.gz"



Instead of gzip compression, you may also create the archive file with bzip2 compression. To do that, you will use the "-j" option in the tar command. Below is the example:

How to compress a directory

Besides compressing and bundle the files, you may also compress directories. Below is the example of compressing directory

How to list the contents of an archive file

To view the contents of an archive file without actually extracting it, you can use the tar command with the "-t" option. The command would be:

How to extract an archive file

To extract an archive file, you can use the tar command with the "-x" option. The files will be extracted in the current directory. The command is shown below:





However, sometimes you may need to extract the files in another directory, to do that, you would use the -C option that followed by the destination path. Below is the example:

How to extract the specific files from an archive file

You can actually only extract some specific files from an archive file. To do that, you may specify the file name that you want to extract after the tar file. Below is the example:

How to add or remove a file to an archive file

Sometimes, you need to add another file to an archive file. To do that, you need to use the "-r" option with the tar command. The command would be:





On the other hand, if you want to remove a file from an archive file, you need to provide the "--delete" option. below is the example:

Conclusion

To recap, as a Linux administrator or user, you need to familiar with the usage of the "tar" command to perform file compression and bundling the files. In this tutorial, we have shared how to use the "tar" command with differnt options. You can compress the files with different algorithms such as gzip, bzip2 as you like.