Good day to you!
First things – first: only the key information you are looking for. In the second part of the article, I will tell you about the useful peculiarities, which you can easily do without.
How to extract the TAR archive:
For Windows:
You can extract tar, using any of the modern Windows archivers, for example, 7-Zip. Details on installing and using 7-Zip you can find in our special article: Download an archiving program for Windows (free and the best)
For Linux/Unix systems:
- Using MC (Midnight Commander – a popular file manager for Linux systems, included in every repository) – just open a tar-file as a folder and copy all its contents.
- From the control console, using the following commands:
tar -xvf archive-file.tar
tar -xvf archive-file.tar.gz
tar -xvf archive-file.tar.bz2
tar -xvf archive-file.tar -C /folder
Description: x – the key, determining that the archive needs unpacking; v – starts the visual display of unpacking process; f – the key, followed by the name of the file that requires unpacking; C – you can (but don’t have to) determine the unpacking path. If the path is not determined – the file will be unpacked into the current folder.
How to create TAR:
For Linux/Unix systems:
tar -cf files.tar ./folder_with_files – create a common tar archive without compression
tar -cvzf files.tar.gz ./folder_with_files - create tar archive, compressed, using gzip
tar -cvjf files.tar.bz ./folder_with_files - create tar archive, compressed, using bzip2
The keys: c – create an archive; f – determine a file name; z - use gzip compression (the most popular); j - use bzip2 compression; v - starts the visual display of unpacking process;
For Windows:
Using a free archiver 7-Zip (the article about it: Download an archiving program for Windows (free and the best)).
1. Click a folder or selected files with the right mouse button, select “7-Zip” from the menu -> “Add to archive...”:
2. Choose the archive format - tar, change the archive name and other settings if necessary and click “Ок”:
Useful information about Tar archiver:
Tar – the main archiver for Linux and Unix systems. If you create an archive for such a system, it’s advisable to use tar. Although they support Zip as well, it operates far too slowly and is not used in many systems.
If any compression facilities are used, when creating a tar archive, they are usually stated in the file name. For example, files.tar.gz - the tar archive, which has been created, using gzip compression, files.tar.bz2 - the tar archive, in which bzip2 compression has been used.
If you have any questions left or need some more details – please, ask a question or leave a comment.
I will always be pleased to help you!
Good luck to you!