13 useful tar commands for your daily uses
List of various tar commands for your daily uses.
- Create an (uncompressed) archive.
- Create:
tar cvf data.tar data/
- Extract:
tar xvf data.tar
2. Create and compress in xz format
Note: xz = LZMA = Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm
- Create:
tar Jcvf data.tar.xz data/
- Extract:
tar xvf data.tar.xz
3. Create and compress in gzip format
- Create:
tar zcvf data.tar.gz data/
- Extract:
tar xvf data.tar.gz
4. Create and compress in bzip2 format
- Create:
tar jcvf data.tar.bz2 data/
- Extract:
tar xvf data.tar.bz2
5. Create and compress in zip format
- Create:
zip data.zip -r data/
- Extract:
unzip data.zip
- Extract to a directory:
unzip data.zip -d data/
- Create with password:
zip -P <password> data.zip -r data/
- Unzip with password:
unzip -P <password> data.zip
6. To encrypt/decrypt a (tarred) file with OpenSSL
Refer to this post.
7. Create and extract files in lzip format
- Note:
lzip
is required and can be installed with for examplesudo apt install -yq lzip
. - Create:
tar cvf data.tar data && lzip -v data.tar
. - Extract:
tar --lzip -xvf data.tar.lz
, or,lzip -d data.tar.lz && tar xvf data.tar && rm data.tar
.
Results of compressing 3k text files
Extension | Size | Size reduction |
---|---|---|
tar | 36MB | 0% |
tar.xz | 6.8MB | 81% |
tar.gz | 11MB | 69% |
tar.bz2 | 7.5MB | 79% |
zip | 13MB | 64% |
tar.lz | 6.8MB | 81% |