tar — how to create and extract tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives

Creating archives

To create a tar archive the c switch is used. To further encode it using gzip compression the j option is also added, or for bzip2 compression the j switch is included. Note that tar program pipes its output into gzip and bzip2 tools in order to create the tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives, respectively. OK, to compress a directory called dir into dir.tar, dir.tar.gz and dir.tar.bz2 archives, the following commands are used, respectively.

tar cf dir.tar dir/  # ©2007 linux.dsplabs.com.au
tar czf dir.tar.gz dir/  # ©2007 linux.dsplabs.com.au
tar cjf dir.tar.bz2 dir/



Extracting archives

Extracting archives is also very simple. Instead of the c switch the x is used and the archive name is given as the only other parameter. The commands for archive extraction shown below correspond to the archive creation commands given earlier.

# ©2007 linux.dsplabs.com.au # ©2007 linux.dsplabs.com.autar xf dir.tar
tar xzf dir.tar.gz
tar xjf dir.tar.bz2

The verbose mode

The v switch can be used to enable the verbose mode. This can be useful if you would like to see a list of files being compressed or extracted. For example, lets extract the dir.tar.gz archive, with verbose mode enabled, using the following command.

tar xvzf dir.tar.gz # ©2007 linux.dsplabs.com.au

The above command produces a list of inflated files as shown in the following output.

dir/
dir/NVIDIA_DRIVER_README.txt
dir/NVIDIA_LICENSE.txt
dir/readme.txt