The cheatsheet
Untar/unzip a tar
or tar.gz
file into the current directory:
tar -xvf /path/to/archive
Zip/tar a directory into a compressed archive:
tar -cavf /path/to/archive.tar.gz /path/to/folder
The explanation
If you're ever on Linux, tar
might be one of those commands that you copy/paste every single time. Whether you're following the guide to install Golang and you paste in the command that's listed in the guide, or you encounter a stray tar.gz
file and now you gotta look up the plethora of flags to figure out what you need.
Let's demystify tar. You're welcome to use this article as a guide or just as a cheatsheet. I'm writing it as both...for myself.
What is tar
?
A tar
or tarball
is a single file that represents many files. You can call it an archive
but before compression, it really was just a way to represent a file directory and collection of files as a single file.
You might be more familiar with a zip
file (which is an archive but with compression) or a rar
which is another compressed archive format.
On top of allowing us to transport entire directories as "one file", tar also allowed fun stuff like checksum
, providing a file size for the entire archive, and later, compression.
What is tar.gz
?
A tar.gz
is a compressed tar
archive. If you ever see just .tar
on an archive, it means that there's no compression. With tar.gz
(or tar.xz
or tar.zst
), you always expect compression. The gz
itself might seem familiar and that's because the tar
archive was compressed via gzip
.
Gzip is a compression tool but it is not an archive tool. So you can gzip
a single file (web servers will gzip
individual files before sending them over the wire) but not a collection of files. Since a tar
is a collection of files put together to create a single file, gzip can compress that.
Unzipping/extracting tar
and tar.gz
files
The tar command breaks down to:
tar [options] file/path
It feels like there are an endless amount of options and I think that goes with any unix
tool. It's straightforward but so customizable.
The flags you need to remember are:
-
x
which tellstar
to extract -
v
for verbose output (recommended) -
f
lets you specify the file you want to extract
Why the f
? Because tar
is unixy and can process data that's been piped over.
For any .tar
or .tar.gz
file, the entire command is:
tar -xvf path/to/archive
This will extract current file into the current directory.
Zipping/tarring files
The tar command is very similar for compressing/archiving files but the command looks a bit different:
tar [options] /path/to/destination/archive.tar.gz path/to/file path/maybe/to/folder
tar
adds every path you specify into the resulting archive so you don't have to tar
a single file or have to pre-group all files in a folder.
It also requires different flags:
-
c
tellstar
to create an archive -
a
tellstar
to compress but only when the file extension calls tar to do it (explanation below) -
v
verbose output -
f
lets you pick the name of the archive to save into
For compression to work, you need to specify the extension on the archive matching the compression tool. So if you want your archive to be gzipped, make sure to add .gz
to your archive name.
The entire command is:
tar -cavf /path/to/archive.tar.gz /paths/to/files/or/folders
Things to remember
You might have already noticed but the tar
command simplifies a lot more or there's a lot less to remember if you keep this in mind:
- use
vf
flags on all standalone commands -
x
means extract -
c
means create -
a
means auto-compress (used only withc
)
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