Creating archive files with .tar, .gz, or .tgz files is easy; it is also called Tarballs.
This command has various attributes, we can use it to create archives.
Compress an Entire Directory or a Single File
You can run the command given below to compress a single file or an entire directory on Linux. It will also work recursively, i.e., compress other directories inside the directory you mentioned in the command.
tar -czvf myarchive-name.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file
Here is the meaning of attributes in the above commands.
- -c: Create an archive file.
- -z: Compress the archive file with gzip.
- -v: You can use -v to display the progress in the terminal while creating the archive. It is also known as a verbose mode. It is optional in the above commands but could be helpful.
- -f: Specify the filename of the archive.
If there is a directory with the name mywork and you want to compress it with the name myarchive.tar.gz.
You can run the following command –
tar -czvf myarchive.tar.gz mywork
If the directory is located at the /usr/local/mywork and you want to compress it with the file name myarchive.tar.gz, then you can run this command –
tar -czvf myarchive.tar.gz /usr/local/mywork
How to Compress Multiple Directories or Files?
tar -czvf myarchive.tar.gz /home/mysql_backup /usr/local/mywork /var/lib/mysql
You can list all the required directories or files, as there are no limitations.
Extract an Entire Directory or a Single File
You can extract the archive file or folder with a similar tar command but with slight changes.
By executing the command given below, you can extract the compressed file myarchive.tar.gz –
tar -xzvf myarchive.tar.gz
Suppose you want to extract the compressed file to a specific location. In that case, you can run the command below and specify the directory location where you want to extract the file –
tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz -C /home/mysql_backup
