Compress Entire Directory to tar archive

Jul 2017

tar files are compressed files that contain all files and folders from a given location. The advantage to using .tar files, other than the obvious (potential) space saving is that you can include all file/folder permissions in the .tar file that would potentially be lost if you were doing a straight copy.

Create .tar File

The basic syntax for tar is quite simple, here is an example:

tar -switches xxx.tar.gz ABC

There are many switches available for .tar, but the main ones we will be using are:

p == preserve permissions
c == create archive
v == verbose (print names while making tar)
z == gzip
f == tar file name

To create a .tar archive, where the file name is archive.tar and the target folder is /home/work we would use the following syntax.

tar -pcvzf archive.tar /home/work

Decompress .tar File

To decompress the .tar file, we use the same tar command, we must use the same switches if we wish to preserve the file/folder structure and the file/folder permissions (permissions are very important).
To decompress the archive.tar file we created earlier, use the following command:

tar -pcvzf archive.tar