We will briefly discuss the use of archiving and data compression via the tar command.

Archiving

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}.

Data unarchive

To unarchive data we use the command tar -xvf followed by the name of the archive

nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ tar -xvf muzik.tar

Archiving and compressing date files

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}.

Decompression of data

To decompress the archive, use the extraction command tar -xvzf

nadir@ipowerht:~/Desktop $ tar -xvzf archive.tar.gz

Conclusion

All of these commands are very useful for backing up your data file . Do not to forget them !