Working with tar and Compression

Creating Archives

# Create a tar archive
tar -cf archive.tar /path/to/files

# Create compressed with gzip
tar -czf archive.tar.gz /path/to/files

# Create compressed with bzip2 (smaller, slower)
tar -cjf archive.tar.bz2 /path/to/files

# Create compressed with xz (smallest, slowest)
tar -cJf archive.tar.xz /path/to/files

Extracting Archives

# Extract tar
tar -xf archive.tar

# Extract gzip
tar -xzf archive.tar.gz

# Extract to specific directory
tar -xzf archive.tar.gz -C /destination/

# Extract bzip2
tar -xjf archive.tar.bz2

Viewing Contents

# List files without extracting
tar -tf archive.tar.gz

# Verbose listing
tar -tvf archive.tar.gz

Advanced Usage

# Exclude patterns
tar -czf backup.tar.gz /var/www --exclude="*.log" --exclude="node_modules"

# Extract single file
tar -xzf archive.tar.gz path/to/specific/file

# Append to existing archive
tar -rf archive.tar newfile.txt

Other Compression Tools

# zip/unzip (for compatibility)
zip -r archive.zip /path/to/files
unzip archive.zip

# Individual file compression
gzip file.txt        # Creates file.txt.gz
gunzip file.txt.gz   # Restores file.txt