Linux tar Example: Compress a Directory and Extract It – Linux Tutorial

By | December 6, 2022

In this tutorial, we will introduce how to use linux tar command to compress a directory then extract it. It is a very useful when you are processing linux files.

Linux tar command can help us to create some archive files with  *.tar, *.tar.gz, *.gz, *.bz2.

Compress a folder using linux tar

We can use command below to compress a directory.

tar -czvf test.tar /home/test

Here we will compress /test directory to test.tar file.

Extract a .tar archive to a directory using linux tar

After we have compressed a directory, we can extract using command below:

tar -xzvf test.tar /home/temp

This command will extract test.tar archive file to the directory /home/temp