Recipe: Archiving with tar


Creating a tar archive
======================

$ tar -cf output.tar [SOURCES]

$ tar -cf output.tar file1 file2 file3 folder1 ..

Append files to archive
=======================

$ tar -rvf original.tar new_file

Printing more details (verbose) / Listing files
================================================

$ tar -tvvf archive.tar
drwxr-xr-x slynux/slynux     0 2010-08-06 09:31 yy/
drwxr-xr-x slynux/slynux     0 2010-08-06 09:39 yy/usr/
drwxr-xr-x slynux/slynux     0 2010-08-06 09:31 yy/usr/lib64/


Extracting archive
==================
$ tar -xf archive.tar 
# Extracts contents of archive in current directory

$ tar -xf archive.tar -C folder_path
#Extracts content of archive in specified directory


stdin and stdout with tar
=========================
$ mkdir ~/destination
$ tar -cf - file1 file2 file3 .. | tar -xvf -  -C ~/destination

Concatenating two archives
==========================
$ tar -Af file1.tar file2.tar

Updating files in an archive
============================
$ tar -uvvf archive.tar filea


Comparing files in archive and file system
==========================================
$ tar -df archive.tar afile bfile
afile: Mod time differs 
afile: Size differs 

Deleting files from archive
===========================

$ tar -f archive.tar --delete file1 file2 ..

$ tar --delete [FILE LIST] archive.tar

Compression with tar archive
============================

Use -a and use .tar.lzma, .tar.gz, tar.bz2 as extension for files

Excluding a set of files from archiving
=======================================
$ tar -cf arch.tar * --exclude "*.txt"

$ tar -cf arch.tar * -X list
# list is a file containing list of filepaths

Excluding version control directories
=====================================
use --exclude-vcs 

Printing total bytes
====================
use --totals

$ tar -cf arc.tar * --exclude "*.txt" --totals 
Total bytes written: 20480 (20KiB, 12MiB/s)