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We will briefly discuss the use of archiving and data compression via the tar command.
To archive data, we use the command tar -cvf, like this:
nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ ls -al
total 73796
drwxr-xr-x 8 nadir nadir 4096 2005-10-14 18:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 37 nadir nadir 4096 2005-10-14 18:49 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 nadir nadir 72265250 2005-10-14 00:30 archive.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 nadir nadir 69 2005-03-20 17:22 .directory
drwxr-xr-x 2 nadir nadir 4096 2005-04-08 00:10 evian
drwxr-xr-x 2 nadir nadir 4096 2005-10-14 18:56 muzik
-rw-r--r-- 1 nadir nadir 18652 2005-10-14 14:21 pagerankstatus-0.9.5.xpi
drwxr-xr-x 2 nadir nadir 4096 2005-05-16 18:08 poster
-rw-r--r-- 1 nadir nadir 1517514 2005-05-16 17:18 poster.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x 2 nadir nadir 4096 2005-05-16 18:03 poster.tar.gz_FILES
drwxrwxr-x 10 nadir nadir 4096 1970-01-01 01:00 Sauvegarde
-rw-r--r-- 1 nadir nadir 1686 2005-10-13 17:12 sources.list
drwxr-xr-x 4 nadir nadir 4096 2005-03-27 19:13 these
-rwx------ 1 nadir nadir 1632848 2005-03-19 22:53 these.tar.gz
nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ tar -cvf muzik.tar muzik
nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ ls *.tar
muzik.tar
tar -cvf is followed by the name of the archive, it must always end with .tar here it is muzik.tar, and the name of the directory that we want to archive, here it is muzik.
To unarchive data we use the command tar -xvf followed by the name of the archive
nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ tar -xvf muzik.tar
When the data volume is important, we sometimes want to compress the data using the gunzip utility, we use the command tar -cvzf
nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz muzik
tar -cvzf est suivi du nom de l’archive (elle doit toujours terminer par .tar.gz ici c’est archive.tar.gz, et du nom du répertoire que l’on veut archiver, ici c’est muzik.
To decompress the archive, use the extraction command tar -xvzf
nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ tar -xvzf archive.tar.gz
All of these commands are very useful for backing up your data file . Do not to forget them !