Compress and Extract Files using tar on command line

As web developers, we deal with ‘tar.gz’ archives quite often.  Here are a few useful commands.

Creating a ‘tar.gz’ archive from a directory

  tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name

Extracting a ‘tar.gz’ archive

  tar -zxvf archive-name.tar.gz

Option types for tar

There are various ways to specify options when using the ‘tar’ command:

• tar -z -x -v -f archive-name.tar.gz
• tar -zxvf archive-name.tar.gz
• tar zxvf archive-name.tar.gz
• tar –extract -verbose -gzip – file archive-name.tar.gz

For further information about all the options, you can use the command line man page or online