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Table of Contents
Working with the Tape Archive Utility (TAR)
To make a tar file from the directory homework1
<code bash>
$ tar czf homework1 homework1.tgz </code> To check the contents of a tar file called homework1.tgz
<code bash>
$ tar tzf homework.tgz </code> To extract the contents of a tar file called homework1.tgz
<code bash>
$ tar xzf homework1.tgz </code>
Overview
tar or the Tape ARchive utility is a program that is used for combining multiple files into a single file. This is the format that is used to transfer multiple files in the majority of open source project.
Tar files are frequently used to transfer the contents of a directory. The examples on this page assume that you want to transfer all of the files in a directory called homework1 . Further assume the contents of this directory are two files, hello.cpp and Makefile .
[dbennett@cslab103 homework1]$ ls Makefile hello.cpp
Files created with tar frequently have the extension .tar. The file homework1.tar is the conventional name used for a tar file containing the directory homework1.
Tar is frequently used in conjunction with compression utilities. GNU zip (gzip) is a common choice for this. A tar file which has been compressed with gzip will frequently have the extension .tgz or even .tar.gz. In this case homework1.tgz or homework1.tar.gz are the conventional names for a tar file containing the directory homework1 which has been compressed with gzip.
This page is a summary, there are other ways that tar can be employed.
Creating a TAR File
The best parctice