General Information
You’ve downloaded them, you’ve extracted them, you’ve liked them. But how do you create them? This guide will show you how to quickly and easily create a compressed archive in the form of *.tar.gz and *.tar.bz2.
Requirements
- Local access on the box.
- A SSH client such as puTTy or SecureCRT (if you are setting it up remotely).
- Files you want to archive.
Usage
# tar -cvf archive.tar file
The -c flag tells tar to create a new archive. The -v flag tells tar to display the results while tarring. The -f flag tells tar to create a file named archive.tar. You can either tar directories or files specificied by file. You can enter several files/directories separated by spaces if you want.
There are two common methods of compression:
# tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz file # tar -cvjf archive.tar.bz2 file
The -z flag indicates to run the archive through gzip while the -j runs the archive through bzip2.
That’s all there is to making your compressed archives.