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HowTo tar and untar gz archives from shell

I do not need tarring too often and when I do I can not remember how those tar flags needed to be to get what I wanted. Even man pages fails to view the most common use cases to tar and untar.

Create gzipped tar archive from commandline

Assuming you are in shell and production_folder is the folder you want to tar and gzip.

tar czvf my_backup.tar.gz production_folder/

This will create a my_backup.tar.gz archive for you.

 

Untar gzipped tar archive from commandline

This command will untar the my_backup.tar.gz to current folder, usually tar contains "root" folder where all files are.

tar xzvf my_backup.tar.gz

Thumb rule how to remember

You always need atleast zf parameter and those letter stands for:

• z = to use gzip / gunzip
• f = file to archive / unarchive
• v = verbose list files processed, not needed but you can see what is happening

Then the variating part in the beginning is:

• c = create new archive
• x = extract files from archive

Simple uh, but so hard to remember, hopefully this post makes you remember too