Archiving

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Archiving#

This page discusses common linux tools to work with archives. For more infomation check GNU tar manual.

Create (-cf)#

The most common way to archive some data is to use tar -cf command. Here c refers to “create”, you need specify files to be used for creating of the archive to it. f refers to file, so you need to specify the path to the output archive file.

The following cell generates some data to be archived and applies long form of the tar -cf to perform that

[ -d /tmp/archiving ] && rm -r /tmp/archiving
mkdir /tmp/archiving
echo "this is my small test" > /tmp/archiving/test_file

cd /tmp/archiving
tar -c --file=/tmp/archiving/hello.tar test_file

As a result, we got a file with the name we’d specified as the output.

ls -la

total 32
drwxrwxr-x  2 fedor fedor  4096 Feb 23 01:00 .
drwxrwxrwt 23 root  root  12288 Feb 23 01:00 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 fedor fedor 10240 Feb 23 01:00 hello.tar
-rw-rw-r--  1 fedor fedor    22 Feb 23 01:00 test_file

Gzip#

Gzip is a typical file compression algorithm. Typical postfix for files is tar.gz. The tar utility uses the -z parameter to indicate that it is working with the gzip algorithm.

The following cell creates a file to be used for the experiment and uses tar -czf to archive it.

cat /dev/random | head -n 500 >  /tmp/some_file
tar -czf /tmp/res.tar.gz /tmp/some_file

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

The following cell uses tar -xzf to extract files.

tar -xzf /tmp/res.tar.gz -C /tmp
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