Syntax for untar in linux archive#

Just to give you an idea, you can run the tar command in the following way and obtain the same output: tar -t -v -f archive.tar The output is the same, this mean the dash is not necessary. So, let’s see if passing the dash or not makes any difference.įirst of all, let’s try to run the same command without using the dash before the flags: tar tvf archive.tar I noticed that is some cases the dash before the flags was present but it wasn’t always the case. I will explain what I mean in the next section… Shall I Use the Dash or Not with Tar? One of the things I noticed when I started using the tar command is that different people were running it in a slightly different way. rw-rw-r- myuser/mygroup 0 09:38 testfile2 rw-rw-r- myuser/mygroup 0 09:38 testfile1

Syntax for untar in linux archive#

We can now put together three flags: -t, -v and -f to see the files in the archive we have previously created: tar -tvf archive.tar To list all the files in a tar archive without extracting its content we will introduce a fourth flag: Makes sense? List all files in a tar archive verbosely Let’s swap the -f and -v flags in the tar command and try again: tar -cvf archive.tar testfile1 testfile2Īll good this time, the verbose flag show the names of the two files being added to the archive we are creating. This show how important is the order of flags for tar. The “No such file or directory” directory is caused by the fact that tar tries to create an archive called v that contains three files: archive.tar, testfile1 and testfile2.īut archive.tar doesn’t exist and hence the error. 1 myuser mygroup 10240 Jul 17 09:42 file v 1 myuser mygroup 0 Jul 17 09:38 testfile2 1 myuser mygroup 0 Jul 17 09:38 testfile1 The result is an archive called v as you can see from the ls output below: ls -alĭrwxrwxr-x. That’s because the tar command creates an archive with a name based on what follows the -f flag, and in this case after the -f flag there is v. Weird, for some reason we get an error back… Tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors Tar: archive.tar: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

Let’s see how the output changes if we also pass the -v flag when creating the archive: tar -cfv archive.tar testfile1 testfile2 The file command confirms that archive.tar is an archive: file archive.tarĪnother useful flag is the -v flag that provides a verbose output of the files processed during the execution of the tar command on Linux. f: it allows to specify an archive file (in this case called archive.tar) c (same as –create): create a new archive This command creates an archive file called archive.tar that contains two files: testfile1 and testfile2. Here is a basic example of tar command, in this case we are not using compression: tar -cf archive.tar testfile1 testfile2

Conclusion Create an archive that contains two files.

List all files in a tar archive verbosely.

Create an archive that contains two files.