How to Combine and Compress files on Linux using the TAR command

Linux provides various utilities to compress and combine files, with the tar command being one of the most commonly used. tar stands for "tape archive", and is a versatile utility for creating and manipulating compressed archive files. It is a powerful tool that can be used for a variety of tasks, from creating backups of important files to compressing multiple files into a single archive.

The basic syntax of the tar command is as follows:

tar [options] archive_name files_or_directories

Here, options are the various flags that can be used to modify the behavior of the command, such as -c for creating a new archive, -x for extracting files from an archive, and -z for compressing or decompressing an archive using gzip.

archive_name is the name of the archive file that will be created or operated on, and files_or_directories is a list of one or more files or directories that will be included in the archive.

For example, to create a new tarball of a directory called my_folder, you could use the following command:

tar -czvf my_folder.tar.gz my_folder/

Here, the -c flag indicates that a new archive should be created, the -z flag specifies that the archive should be compressed with gzip, the -v flag enables verbose output so that the user can see which files are being added to the archive, and the f flag specifies the name of the archive file.

To extract the contents of the tarball, you can use the following command:

tar -xzvf my_folder.tar.gz

Here, the -x flag indicates that the files should be extracted from the archive, and the other flags have the same meanings as before.

Overall, the tar command is a versatile and powerful tool that is essential for managing and manipulating archive files in Linux.

Simple Examples

# Create archive.tar from files foo and bar.
tar -cf archive.tar foo bar

# List all files in archive.tar verbosely.
tar -tvf archive.tar               

# Extract all files from archive.tar.
tar -xf archive.tar

# Compress directory baz into archive.tar.gz
tar -czvf archive.tar.gz baz/

-c, --create create a new archive

-t, --list list the contents of an archive

-x, --extract, --get extract files from an archive

-v, --verbose verbosely list files processed

-f, --file=ARCHIVE use archive file or device ARCHIVE

-z, --gzip, --ungzip use the gzip compression format

Difference between TAR and ZIP files

The tar file is a file format in itself designed for tape archives. This format can then be compressed using (for example) gzip or bzip2 compression formats. When you extract a compressed tar file, you effectively uncompress it, then extract the original files from the uncompressed tar file.

The zip tool is a completely different thing. It takes a bunch of files and combines them into a single compressed file. With totally different algorithms.

The tar tool is just combining several files into a single file without any compression.

The gzip tool is just compressing a single file.

If you want to have both, you just combine both tools resulting in a .tar.gz file.

For more info:

Visit the man page for tar on your shell:

man tar