Linux provides gtar
command in order to compress and create tar files. If we are trying to tar a directory and within this directory, there will be a lot of sub-directories and files. We need to tar this directory with tar
format. We can use gtar
which is an alias of the tar
command to create tar archives.
Install For Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali
We can install tar
command with the following command.
$ sudo apt install tar

Install Fedora, RedHat, CentOS
We can install tar
for Fedora, RedHat, CentOS with dnf
or yum
command like below.
$ sudo yum install tar
OR
$ sudo dnf install tar
Create Tar Archive
We can create new tar
file by using cvf
options like below. We will provide the directory name or path and also provide the newly created archive file with .tar
extension. We will tar the directory with the nmap
to the nmap.tar
$ tar -cvf nmap.tar nmap

Extract Tar Archive
We can extract a tar archive with the xvf
option like below. We will just provide the name of the tar archive which is nmap.tar
in this case.
$ tar -xvf nmap.tar
Compress Tar Archive with Gzip
We can create a tar archive which is also compressed by using Gzip compression algorithm. We will just provide the -z
option to the default tar
creation options. We will create tar.gz
gzip compressed archive from the directory nmap
in this example.
$ tar cvzf nmap.tar.gz nmap

Compress Tar Archive with Bzip
Bzip is another compression algorithm which can be used to compress tar files to use less storage. We will provide extra -j
option to the xvf
like below.
$ tar cvjf nmap.tar.bz nmap