e.g: tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file
- -c: Create an archive.
- -z: Compress the archive with gzip.
- -v: makes tar talk a lot. Verbose output shows you all the files being archived and much.
- -f: Allows you to specify the filename of the archive.
e.g: tar -xvzf name-of-archive.tar.gz
- f: this must be the last flag of the command, and the tar file must be immediately after. It tells tar the name and path of the compressed file.
- z: tells tar to decompress the archive using gzip
- x: tar can collect files or extract them. x does the latter.
- v: makes tar talk a lot. Verbose output shows you all the files being extracted.
Hope nobody minds if I add this, but here's the command for multithreaded compression (needs 'pigz' installed of course):
tar --use-compress-program=pigz -cf <file.tar.gz> <path-or-file>
or short:
tar -I pigz -cf <file.tar.gz> <path-or-file>