Tar Command Cheat Sheet

By Hideki Ishiguro at

tar command archives files/directories, or extracts the archives.
In this article, I listed examples which we would use often.

For zip and gzip and bzip2, please check the post.


Create archive from a file

tar -cf archive.tar sample.txt

If you want to display the result,

tar -cvf archive.tar sample.txt

Create archive from multiple files

tar -cf archive.tar sample1.txt sample2.txt

Append new files to the archive

tar -rf archive.tar sample.txt

Delete files from the archive

tar --delete -f archive.tar sample.txt

Extract archives

tar -xf archive.tar

If you want to display the result,

tar -xvf archive.tar

View the contents of the archive

tar -tf archive.tar