Linux Commands: Using the tar Command

Let's learn some Linux commands. This lesson I'll teach you how to use the tar command. We are going to learn how to make an archive in a Unix-based system such as Linux or Mac OS. An archive is when you take several files and you make them into a single file. Usually you make an archive and you want to send someone a lot of files and you don't want to do them one by one. Instead what you do is you create an archive and take all these files and put them in a single file and then you send that file over. Typically after archiving you also do what's called compression so you can reduce the file size to save some bandwidth. This lesson I'll just talk about the archiving part with tar command. So let's do it. I'll just essentially teach you how to do three things. One of them is how to create an archive. The second how to list the contents of an existing archive without extracting. And the third is how to extract an existing archive. So let's get started here. I have in my directory I did a ls-l and I have two files one called notes.txt and another called sample.jpg. One is a text file the other is an image. Text file as you can see here from the number 69 right after my user my group name that's 69 bytes in size for the sample.jpg the size is 14,928 bytes. So let's say you have several files in my case it's a very small size by simple size two files but we can generalize this for as many files as you want so imagine you have a lot of files. So we want to create an archive and you want to combine all these files into a single file you're gonna create a single file that includes all these files. Let's do it that's the tar command Tar and to create one you need an option for create. I'm gonna start with the typically people use the shortcuts as they get more familiar with the commands and I'm gonna start with the long option name okay so you can learn first what it means and then you can later use the shortcut so I'm gonna say dash dash create because I want to create an archive that's the option and then the next thing I'm going to do I have to tell Tar what's the resulting file name right the archive file name I'm just gonna say archive but to do that I have to use the option dash dash file and I have to give it the file name I'm gonna say archive dot tar that's the resulting file name and immediately after at the end of the line I'm gonna specify all the files that I want to be included in this archive so I'm gonna say notes dot txt space sample dot jpg and that's it so we have called to the tar command to create an archive whose resulting file with dash dash file archive dot tar has that name and then at the end we have the listing of all the files that we want to place in that archive let's do it so with that I can do another listing a less dash L and you can see there's a new file here called archive tar you can see the file size is 20,480 did you notice that if I add up the file sizes from notes dot txt which is 69 and sample dot jpg which is 14,928 we would get what 14,900 and what 97 right and compared to 20,480 there's a difference there so the archive actually has more in size than the individual files themselves if their sizes that are up that's because the archive creates some overhead as it's made but typically if you have a lot a lot lot lot more files I think the overhead will be less significant in any case that's how we create an archive now that I told you about the long options right but typically people like to first use the shortcut and then later like to combine all the options together to a single single string of options so instead of dash dash create you can just say dash c that's the shortcut how people would traditionally use it right and instead of dash dash file we can use dash f okay that's the same thing and you're gonna get the same it's just gonna overwrite now people also like to combine the options so you can have dash c followed by f so you can combine this two into one and it's gonna do the same thing so tar dash c f meaning create and here's the resulting file archive that are did you notice that every time I type my tar command and a press enter that it seems that nothing happened but something actually happened so people also like to add the dash v option for verbose so you could add that too if you would like right in between the C and B or before the C whatever CVF so the V is an option to be verbose so it will tell you in each line the file that was added to the archive so you you probably gonna see these options used very often as someone asked you to tar something or maybe extract later on as you will see the V option stands for verbose so it tells you the stuff it did in this case tells you the file names that were archived so now let's learn how to list the contents without extracting it so I'm gonna say tar already have an archive right archive tar that's the file we want to check to see what's inside and I'm gonna say dash t okay t is gonna be the option though let us check the contents and if you want to be verbose you can add the V up to you and you can also and then you have to say F so you have to tell it what archive you want to check archive tar so we can see tar space dash T V F space archive tar and immediately after it lists each file that's in the archive and that matches what we had right notes dot txt and sample dot J PG okay if you want to do this long listing you can always check the manual I suggest you do man space tar and depending on your system in my case I am using a Linux distribution Ubuntu and here is how my tar command the options are like so and I was I just thought you how to use dash T but there's the long option name here and I would use dash dash list in this case I know the first letters not T but that's what I would use in a long listing so the T is for the listing of the contents okay next we are going to learn how to extract you can see here if you look at the menu tar dash dash extract is what we want the shortcut will be just X as you can see on the first line of this my screen my window so let's get started let me make a director here dear to and I'm going to CD to dear to so I can extract here instead of the same directory that I was because I already had the files there so what I'm gonna say is gonna say tar so I want to extract so I can either say dash dash extract and so on or I can use the shortcuts which is dash X and it can already combine all the other options or if you'd like you can separate them with dash space dash other option what I'm gonna do altogether so you can do verbose dash V if you want and you can add the you have to add the F to specify the file name in this case would be one directory up right so I'm gonna say dot dot slash dot dot stands for the directory one level up from where I am in this case tape archive and slash the name of your archive in my case archive tar and you can see it's verbose and it told us each file that was extracted I can do a LS dash L here in the current directory and I can see the notes is here and sample JPG is here you can see the file names 69 bytes and 14,920 bytes is the same as the ones that were present in the directory one level up okay so in this lesson we learned to use the tar command tar stands for a tape archive they used to use tapes to record file data back in the days and we learned three operations in the first one how to create an archive with dash C second one how to check the contents of an archive dash T third one how to extract the contents of an archive dash X if you want to be verbose and have the command spit out some stuff while it's working you can use the dash V option and remember to always use the dash F option to specify the file name for the operation in question in the case of creating a archive if you tell it what's the name of the archive in the case of checking an archive you have to tell it the file name of the archive you want to check with the dash F option and lastly when you want to extract an archive you have to use the dash F to specify which file you want to extract which archive note that I showed you how to extract everything from an archive but that you might not always want to extract everything but specific files you can always do that as you do the extractor man you can specify the files you want to extract for example if I go back here and I create another directory 3 I'm gonna see the directory 3 I want to tar dash X VF dot slash archive dot tar but I only want to take notes dot txt how could I do that so let's try this notes dot txt at the end so let's do a listing now you can see now when I specify the specific file name at the end of the command it's a it only extracted that specific file so that's how you would do it if you want specific ones of course I can do it again and extract just the sample so I can have all of them now okay and that's the last point I wanted you to know of course the tar command has a lot more options you can do man tar and check them out if you need something that's more than the basic basics that I just taught you you can have a look and there's a lot in there that's the key to quit the menu page thank you so much for watching this video please leave your like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one