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(on Wikipedia)

An omnipresent file archiver.

• Tape Archiver

Usage ∞

Uncompressing .tar archives ∞

It’s amazingly inobvious, but to untar something is:

\tar  -xvf  filename.tar

For gzip compression:

# With the multiple-extension
\tar  -xvvf  filename.tar.gz

# Or with the .tgz extension
\tar  -xvvf  filename.tgz

For bzip2 (better) compression:

\tar  -xvvzf  filename.tar.bz

I don’t know why it’s too stupid to just know what to do based on the filename. That’s UNIX for you. Stupid stupid stupid.

Making tar archives ∞

# File(s)
\tar  -czvf  filename.tgz  file1  file2

# Directory
\tar  -czvf  filename.tgz  dir/
\tar  -czvf  filename.tar.gz  dir/

# Directory, gzip
\tar  -czvzSf  filename.tgz  dir/

# Directory, bzip2
\tar  -cvjSf  file.tar.bz2  directory/
\tar  --create  --verbose  --bzip2  --sparse  --file=file.tar.bz2  directory/

Make the tarball — all files and all dotfiles in the current directory.

\tar  -czvf  $0.tar.gz  *  $( \ls -A | \grep "^\." )

All files, even dotfiles, but not .svn (Subversion) or anything in a .svn directory.

\tar  --exclude ".svn"  -czvf  new_archive.tar.gz  *  $( \ls -A | \grep "^\." )

Merging directories ∞

\cf - . |(cd /targetdir; tar xvf -)

Tested and works.

Notes ∞

• tar is very good about preserving attributes.

• This is slower than I’d like, and it appears to be doing a copy-before-move.