Bash Tar Archives

Creating Archives with tar -czvf

tar was originally built for writing streams of files to tape, and that streaming design is still why it is the standard way to bundle a Linux directory tree into one file. On its own tar only concatenates files; adding -z pipes that stream through gzip, producing the familiar .tar.gz format.

$ tar -czvf project-backup.tar.gz ./project
project/
project/src/
project/src/main.sh
project/README.md
project/config.yml

Each letter in -czvf does one job: c creates a new archive, z compresses the stream with gzip, v prints each file as it's added (verbose), and f names the archive file that follows. f must come last in the flag group, right before the filename, because tar expects the very next argument after f to be that filename.

$ du -sh ./project
48M     ./project
$ ls -lh project-backup.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 dev dev 11M Jul 16 14:40 project-backup.tar.gz

Extracting with tar -xzvf

Extraction mirrors creation: swap -c for -x and the same z, v, f letters apply. tar extracts into the current directory by default, but -C redirects the output to any directory of your choice, which is useful for restoring into a fresh location instead of overwriting the original.

$ tar -xzvf project-backup.tar.gz -C /tmp/restore
project/
project/src/
project/src/main.sh
project/README.md
project/config.yml

• -c creates a new archive
• -x extracts an existing archive
• -z compresses or decompresses with gzip
• -j compresses or decompresses with bzip2 instead of gzip
• -v prints each file as it's processed (verbose)
• -f specifies the archive filename, and must come last
• -C DIR extracts into DIR instead of the current directory
• -t lists an archive's contents without extracting