How to Compress and Extract Files using the tar command on Linux

How to Compress and Extract Files using the tar command on Linux and How to create tar.gz file in Linux command line

Compress files

The tar command is used to pack and compress files and directories on Linux.

The archived files are usually named .tar.gz or .tgz and are called usually tarballs. As with many Linux commands, there are many options that can be used with the tar command.

Tar can compress and also extract .tar.gz or .tgz archives.

Example command to backup multiple directories into a tarball.

tar -czf /var/dibackup/backup-$datetxt.tar.gz /etc/ /home/ /var/www/ /var/dibackup/db-backup/

Here -czf means create a new archive, use gzip, specify the archive file name and compress the following files/directories – multiple paths are passed separated by space.

If you want to see more details about the process you can also use the -v option, v is for verbose listing of processed files.

tar -czvf /var/dibackup/backup-$datetxt.tar.gz /etc/ /home/ /var/www/ /var/dibackup/db-backup/

If you would like to exclude some directories you can use the –exclude option

tar -czvf /var/dibackup/backup-$datetxt.tar.gz /etc/ /home/ /var/www/ /var/dibackup/db-backup/ --exclude=/home/dragos/Downloads

Once finished, you will have a .tar.gz or .tgz file that is the archive.

Test – list archive contents

To list all files in the archive. Lists all files in archive-file.tgz verbosely.

tar -tvf archive-file.tgz

Extracting files from archive

When you need to extract the archive to the current directory you can use use the command bellow. Extracts all files from archive-file.tgz.

tar -xf archive-file.tgz

or to specify gzip

tar -xzf archive-file.tgz

or for verbose

tar -xzvf archive-file.tgz

Extract to directory

If you want the archive to be extracted to a specific directory you can use the -C option (capital C) change to directory DIR.

tar -xzf archive-file.tgz -C /home/dragos/archive-extracted

Using bzip2 instead of gzip

To use bzip2 compression instead of gzip, replace the -z option in the above commands with -j

tar command options used

Options used explanations:
-c, --create               create a new archive
-z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip   filter the archive through gzip
-f, --file=ARCHIVE         use archive file or device ARCHIVE
-v, --verbose              verbosely list files processed
-t, --list                 list the contents of an archive
-j, --bzip2                filter the archive through bzip2
--exclude=PATTERN      exclude files, given as a PATTERN
-C, --directory=DIR        change to directory DIR

All command options

To see the available options you can see the man page or help or the tar command.

tar --help
man tar

If you are using Windows 10 or Windows 11 there is a good archiving tool called 7-Zip. You can use it to create or extract archives. Even archives created with tar on Linux.