Linux Tar Command: Create, Extract, and Compress Archives

Tar is a widely used Linux archiving tool—short for “tape archive” that bundles multiple files and directories into a single archive (a tarball) while preserving paths, permissions, ownership, and timestamps, and it can also compress or extract those archives for efficient backup, distribution, and recovery.

tar.zst provide much faster compression and decompression. Compression ratio is much better than tar.gz

I compressed a folder with 231G files. Here is the result. tar.zst take only 16 minutes. tar.gz take 57 minutes. tar.zst file is 6 GB smaller.

zst not installed on ubuntu by default, you need it installed with command

sudo apt install zst

To create zst file, run

tar --zstd -cvf  backup.tar.zst FOLDER

To create a compressed tar (tar.gz or tgz) file, run

tar -czvf backup.tgz FOLDER

Replace FOLDER with name of the directory you need to compress. It will create a backup.tgz file with all content of the specified directory.

To extract a tar/tar.gz/tgz file, run

tar xvf file.tar.gz

Uncompress tar.bz2 file

tar -jxvf ncftp-3.2.2-src.tar.bz2

Create a tar file

tar -cvf file.tar FOLDER_NAME

Example

tar -cvf backup.tar public_html

Once backup.tar file is created, you can make it tar.gz with command

gzip backup.tar

Exclude a folder from tar file

To exclude a folder, you can use –exclude option.

tar cvf backup.tar --exclude=public_html/uploads --exclude=public_html/wordpress public_html

List content of a tar file

tar --list --verbose --file=BACKUP.tar.gz

If you want to exclude a folder from the file list, use

tar --list --verbose --file=BACKUP.tar.gz --exclude=home/haridy/Maildir

This will exclude all files that are inside folder “home/haridy/Maildir”. You can use multiple –exclude if required.

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