Common Commands

Creating an uncompressed archive

tar cvf file.tar *

Updating an existing archive

tar rvf file.tar *

Extracting files from an archive

tar xvf file.tar

Listing the content of an archive

tar tf file.tar

Creating a gzip compressed archive

tar cvzf file.tar.gz *

Extracting a gzip compressed archive

tar xvzf file.tar.gz

Common Options

• -c creates archive
• -x extracts archive
• -f given archive filename
• -t list the archive content
• -v displays verbose information (and progress)
• -u archives and adds to an existing archive
• -r update or append to the existing archive
• -j filter archive through bzip2
• -z filter archive through gzip
• -W verify an archive
• -A concatenates the archives
• --exclude excludes file or directory
• --delete removes file or directory