Tar

Documentation

tar(1) - Linux manual page

Options

-c : Creates Archive 
-x : Extract the archive 
-f : creates archive with given filename 
-t : displays or lists files in archived file 
-u : archives and adds to an existing archive file 
-v : Displays Verbose Information 
-A : Concatenates the archive files 
-z : zip, tells tar command that creates tar file using gzip 
-j : filter archive tar file using tbzip 
-W : Verify a archive file 
-r : update or add file or directory in already existed .tar file 

Usage

Creating an uncompressed tar Archive using option -cvf

This command creates a tar file called file.tar which is the Archive of all .c files in current directory.

tar -cvf <file-name>.tar *.c

Output:

os2.c
os3.c
os4.c

Extracting files from Archive using option -xvf

This command extracts files from Archives.

tar -xvf <file-name>.tar

Output:

os2.c
os3.c
os4.c

gzip compression on the tar Archive, using option -z

This command creates a tar file called file.tar.gz which is the Archive of .c files.

tar -cvzf <file-name>.tar.gz *.c

Extracting a gzip tar Archive *.tar.gz using option -xvzf

This command extracts files from tar archived file.tar.gz files.

tar -xvzf <file-name>.tar.gz

Creating compressed tar archive file in Linux using option -j

This command compresses and creates archive file less than the size of the gzip. Both compress and decompress takes more time then gzip.

tar -cvfj <file-name>.tar.tbz example.cpp

Output

$ tar -cvfj <file-name>.tar.tbz example.cpp
example.cpp
$ tar -tvf <file-name>.tar.tbz
-rwxrwxrwx root/root        94 2017-09-17 02:47 example.cpp

Untar single tar file or specified directory in Linux

This command will Untar a file in current directory or in a specified directory using -C option.

$ tar -xvfj file.tar 
or 
$ tar -xvfj file.tar -C <path-of-file-in-dir> 

Untar multiple .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.tbz file in Linux

This command will extract or untar multiple files from the tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 archive file. For example the above command will extract “fileA” “fileB” from the archive files.

$ tar -xvf <file-name>.tar "fileA" "fileB" 
or 
$ tar -zxvf <file-name>.tar.gz "fileA" "fileB"
or 
$ tar -jxvf <file-name>.tar.tbz "fileA" "fileB"

Check size of existing tar, tar.gz, tar.tbz file in Linux

The above command will display the size of archive file in Kilobytes(KB).

$ tar -czf <file-name>.tar | wc -c
or 
$ tar -czf <file-name1>.tar.gz | wc -c
or 
$ tar -czf <file-name2>.tar.tbz | wc -c

Update existing tar file in Linux

tar -rvf <file-name>.tar *.c

Output:

os1.c

List the contents and specify the tarfile using option -tf

This command will list the entire list of archived file. We can also list for specific content in a tarfile

tar -tf <file-name>.tar

Output:

example.cpp

Applying pipe to through ‘grep command’ to find what we are looking for

This command will list only for the mentioned text or image in grep from archived file.

$ tar -tvf <file-name>.tar | grep "text to find" 
or
$ tar -tvf <file-name>.tar | grep "filename.file extension"

We can pass a file name as an argument to search a tarfile

This command views the archived files along with their details.

tar -tvf <file-name>.tar filename

Viewing the Archive using option -tvf

tar -tvf <file-name>.tar

Output:

-rwxrwxrwx root/root       191 2017-09-17 02:20 os2.c
-rwxrwxrwx root/root       218 2017-09-17 02:20 os3.c
-rwxrwxrwx root/root       493 2017-09-17 02:20 os4.c

Wildcards

Alternatively referred to as a ‘wild character’ or ‘wildcard character’, a wildcard is a symbol used to replace or represent one or more characters. Wildcards are typically either an asterisk (*), which represents one or more characters or question mark (?),which represents a single character.

To search for an image in .png format

This will extract only files with the extension .png from the archive file.tar. The –wildcards option tells tar to interpret wildcards in the name of the files to be extracted; the filename (.png) is enclosed in single-quotes to protect the wildcard () from being expanded incorrectly by the shell.

tar -tvf <file-name>.tar --wildcards '*.png'