tar file compression and decompression

Tar file compression and decompression

Purpose:

It is the GNU version of the tar archiving utility

Usage:

Main Operations are:

 

Description

Creating an uncompressed tar archive using option cvf

This is the basic command to create a tar archive.

$ tar cvf archive_name.tar dirname/

In the above command:

• c – create a new archive
• v – verbosely list files which are processed.
• f – following is the archive file name
  

The above tar cvf option, does not provide any compression.

1. tar using gzip

To use a gzip compression on the tar archive, use the z option as shown below.

It will create a compressed file called compressed.tar.gz of directory scrennshot.

To later decompress the file and expand the archive, you can use the -x flag:

This will recreate the directory structure in the current directory.

2. tar using bzip2

To use archiving with bzip2, you can replace the -z flag, which is gzip-specific, with the -j flag.

It will create a compressed file called compressed.tar.bz2 of director scrennshot.

To later decompress the file and expand the archive, you can use the -x flag:

This will recreate the directory structure in the current directory.

3. tar with xz

These follow the exact same format using the -J flag.

It will create a compressed file called compressed.tar.xz of directory scrennshot.

To later decompress the file and expand the archive, you can use the -x flag:

This will recreate the directory structure in the current directory.