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Create and extract archives using tar and gzip
November 13, 2015
Programming
One of the simplest tasks is creating and extracting files using tar and gzip. Yet for most new developers this is a daunting task. These days tar is mostly used to simply combine a few files into a single file and then gzip is used to compress that file.
Here is a quick overview how to use tar and gzip to create and compress an archive:
# archive individual files tar -cvzf myarchive.tar.gz /path/to/file1 /path/to/file2 # archive whole directory tar -cvzf myarchive.tar.gz /path/to/dir # archive whole directory but don't store full path tar -cvzf myarchive.tar.gz -C /path/to/dir ./
Options give to tar are: c to create new archive, v to be verbose, z to compress resulting archive with gzip, and f to write the archive to specified file. After options you can list files and dirs you want to archive.
In all examples we provide a full path to a file or dir we want to archive. In this case tar will store files in the archive using the full path. This means once you extract the files you’ll have a complete directory structure from root dir onwards.
The way to avoid this is either to manually cd to dir in which files are stored, or to tell tar using C option to change dir before archiving files.
Finally to extract an archive:
tar -xvzf myarchive.tar.gz
The x option tells tar to extract the archive into current directory.
For more information you can consult manual using man tar.
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