Creating an uncompressed tar Archive using option -cvf : This command creates a tar file called file.tar which is the Archive of all .c files in current directory. 

Extracting files from Archive using option -xvf : This command extracts files from Archives. 

gzip compression on the tar Archive, using option -z : This command creates a tar file called file.tar.gz which is the Archive of .c files. 

Extracting a gzip tar Archive *.tar.gz using option -xvzf : This command extracts files from tar archived file.tar.gz files.  

Creating compressed tar archive file in Linux using option -j : This command compresses and creates archive file less than the size of the gzip. Both compress and decompress takes more time then gzip.  

Untar single tar file or specified directory in Linux : This command will Untar a file in current directory or in a specified directory using -C option. 

Untar multiple .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.tbz file in Linux : This command will extract or untar multiple files from the tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 archive file. For example the above command will extract “fileA” “fileB” from the archive files.  

Check size of existing tar, tar.gz, tar.tbz file in Linux : The above command will display the size of archive file in Kilobytes(KB).  

Update existing tar file in Linux  

list the contents and specify the tarfile using option -tf : This command will list the entire list of archived file. We can also list for specific content in a tarfile  

Applying pipe to through ‘grep command’ to find what we are looking for : This command will list only for the mentioned text or image in grep from archived file.  

We can pass a file name as an argument to search a tarfile : This command views the archived files along with their details.  

Viewing the Archive using option -tvf  

To search for an image in .png format : This will extract only files with the extension .png from the archive file.tar. The –wildcards option tells tar to interpret wildcards in the name of the files 

To combine multiple files into a single archive file (for example, my_files.tar), use the following command (replace file1 and file2 with the names of the files you want to combine)

To combine all the files in a directory into a single archive file (for example, my_files.tar), use the following command (replace /path/to/my/directory with the absolute path to the directory containing the files you want to combine).

To use tar and gzip to combine multiple files into a compressed archive file (for example, my_files.tar.gz), use the following command (replace file1 and file2 with the names of the files you want to combine).

To use tar and gzip to combine all the files in a directory into a compressed archive file (for example, my_files.tar.gz), use the following command (replace /path/to/my/directory with the absolute path to the directory containing the files you want to combine).

If your system does not use GNU tar, but nonetheless has gzip, you can create a compressed tar archive file (for example my_files.tar.gz with the following command (replace file1 and file2 with the names of the files you want to combine)

If gzip isn't available on your system, you can use the compress utility to create a compressed archive (for example, my_files.tar.Z); for example (replace file1 and file2 with the names of the files you want to combine).

To extract the contents of a tar archive file compressed with compress (for example, my_files.tar.Z), use the following command

If you are not using GNU tar and need to extract the contents of a tar archive file compressed with gzip (for example, my_files.tar.gz), use the following command