Therefore, to archive a group of files and compress the result, you can use the commands:
The result will be backup.tar.gz. To unpack this file, use the reverse set of commands:
Of course always make sure that you are in the correct directory before unpacking a tar file.
You can use some UNIX cleverness to do all of this on one command line, as in the following:
Here, we are sending the tar file to `` -'', which stands for tar's standard output. This is piped to gzip, which compresses the incoming tar file, and the result is saved in backup.tar.gz. The -c option to gzip tells gzip to send its output to stdout, which is redirected to backup.tar.gz.
A single command used to unpack this archive would be:
Again, gunzip uncompresses the contents of backup.tar.gz and sends the resulting tar file to stdout. This is piped to tar, which reads `` -'', this time referring to tar's standard input.
Happily, the tar command also includes the z option to automatically compress/uncompress files on the fly, using the gzip compression algorithm.
For example, the command
is equivalent to
Just as the command
may be used instead of
Refer to the man pages for tar and gzip for more information.