The tar command is a powerful utility for creating, extracting, and manipulating archive files, commonly used on Unix-like operating systems. It's essential for bundling multiple files into a single archive and can be combined with compression utilities like gzip or bzip2 to reduce file size.

Extracting Archives with Tar

To extract an uncompressed archive:

tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar

To extract a tar archive into a specified directory:

tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar -C /path/to/destination/

To extract a .tgz or .tar.gz archive:

tar -xzvf /path/to/foo.tgz
tar -xzvf /path/to/foo.tar.gz

To extract a .tar.bz2 archive:

tar -xjvf /path/to/foo.tar.bz2

Creating Archives with Tar

To create an uncompressed archive:

tar -cvf /path/to/foo.tar /path/to/foo/

To create a .tgz or .tar.gz archive:

tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tgz /path/to/foo/
tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tar.gz /path/to/foo/

To create a .tar.bz2 archive:

tar -cjvf /path/to/foo.tar.bz2 /path/to/foo/

Listing Archive Contents

To list the content of a .tgz or .tar.gz archive:

tar -tzvf /path/to/foo.tgz
tar -tzvf /path/to/foo.tar.gz

To list the content of a .tar.bz2 archive:

tar -tjvf /path/to/foo.tar.bz2

Advanced Tar Operations

To create a .tgz archive and exclude specific file types:

tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tgz --exclude=\*.{jpg,gif,png,wmv,flv,tar.gz,zip} /path/to/foo/

To use parallel (multi-threaded) implementation of compression algorithms:

# For gzip
tar -z ... -> tar -Ipigz ...
# For bzip2
tar -j ... -> tar -Ipbzip2 ...
# For xz
tar -J ... -> tar -Ipixz ...

To append a new file to an existing tar archive:

tar -rf <archive.tar> <new-file-to-append>

External Resources

• MDN Web Docs: MIME types (Related to file types often archived)
• GNU Tar Manual (Official documentation)
• Linux Man Pages: tar (Command-line reference)