One of the frequent task that we do with the increasing data on our linux boxes is to compress the files and folders and to do so there is a command tar that we can use to achieve the same.

Below are the examples of how to compress files in a folder to create a tar file.

tar -cvf mycompressedfile.tar /home/user/

where mycompressedfile.tar would be the file name for the compressed file you need to create and /home/user would be the path to the folder you want to compress.

You can use this command to perform tasks based on various filters too, for eg. if you need to create a backup file for all the .gif files in the folder you can simply change the command to.

tar -cvf mycompressedfile.tar /home/user/*.gif

This would create a file mycopressedfile.tar containing all the files with .gif extensions in the /home/user/ directory.

To un-compress the file again you can execute command.

tar -xvf mycompressedfile.tar

The v switch in the above commands refer to verbose which displays the verbose output for the command and can be omitted if not needed.

Hope this helps. Naren