tar

Archiving utility. Often combined with a compression method, such as gzip or bzip2. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar.

• create an archive and write it to a file:

tar cf path/to/target.tar path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

• create a gzipped archive and write it to a file:

tar czf path/to/target.tar.gz path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

• create a gzipped (compressed) archive from a directory using relative paths:

tar czf path/to/target.tar.gz --directory=path/to/directory .

• Extract a (compressed) archive file into the current directory verbosely:

tar xvf path/to/source.tar[.gz|.bz2|.xz]

• Extract a (compressed) archive file into the target directory:

tar xf path/to/source.tar[.gz|.bz2|.xz] --directory=path/to/directory

• create a compressed archive and write it to a file, using the file extension to automatically determine the compression program:

tar caf path/to/target.tar.xz path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

• List the contents of a tar file verbosely:

tar tvf path/to/source.tar

• Extract files matching a pattern from an archive file:

tar xf path/to/source.tar --wildcards "*.html"