We can distinguish many archives format and compressions methods however 3 the most used are Tar, Gz, Bzip archives. TAR command helps working with archives in linux where tar = tape archive and its the most common used options are:
- c – create a new tar file
- t – list the contents of an archive
- z – compress use gzip compress, extension .tar.gz
- j – compress use bzip2 compress, extension .tar.bz2
- v – verbose displays files to compress or uncompress
- f – file specify the new archive name or an archive to extract from
Compress
tar -czvf new_tarname.tar.gz /directory/to/be/compressed/
Create compress .tar.gz archive
tar –czvf only_conf_backup.tar.gz /path/to/*.confra
Extract
tar -xzvf tarname-you-want-to-unzip.tar.gz
Extract single file from compressed .tar.gz
tar -xzvf backup_files.tar.gz myscript.txt
Extract single directory (here conf directory) from compressed .tar.gz
tar -xzvf backup_files.tar.gz conf
Preview files inside archive
tar -tzvf {.tar.gz} tar -tjvf {.tbz2}
Zip
Install zip and unzip then use interactive method:
- Extract using default options, retaining directory structure
unzip file.zip
- Compress file or directory
zip file-or-directory