How to TAR/UNTAR

TAR is used to create a Tape ARchive (tarball). It's pretty much the same concept as a ZIP/RAR file.

To get the files out of a tarball, *.tar :

tar xvf filename.tar

If the tarball has also been gzipped (compressed), *.tar.gz :

tar xvfz filename.tar.gz

Extract only certain directories from the tarball, do this:

tar xvzf filenameg.tar.gz */wanted.dir/*

For file *.tar.bz2, use the following command :

tar yxf filename.tar.bz2

To tar up a file in the current directory into a tarball called filename.tar.gz :

tar cfz filename.tar.gz *.db

To see a list of the files within a tarball :

tar -tzf filename.tar.gz