tar

Create

tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz .

I think .tar.gz and .tgz both describe a Gzip file. To compress a folder:

tar cvzf svn-3281.tgz svn-3281/

To archive files in a symbolic link folder, use the h flag e.g:

tar -hcvzf ~/repo/backup/temp.tar.gz /home/web/repo/temp/

Warning

From tar: cannot open: no such file or directory Make sure h is the first flag (or f is the final flag)!

Extract

tar

To extract the archive filename.tar into the current directory:

tar xf filename.tar

bz2

To extract the archive filename.sql.bz2 into the current directory:

bzip2 -d filename.sql.bz2

To extract the archive filename.tar.bz2 into the current directory:

tar xjf filename.tar.bz2

gz

A gz file is a not actually a tar format. Use gunzip:

gunzip dump.1.gz

tar.gz

To extract the archive filename.tar.gz into the current directory:

tar xzf filename.tar.gz

To strip the initial folder:

tar --strip-components=1 -xzf filename.tar.gz

List

tar -tvf sample.tar
tar -ztvf sample.tar.gz
tar -jtvf sample.tar.bz2