Tarballs

To collect a bunch of files and directories together, use tar.

For example, to tar up your entire home directory and put the tarball into /tmp, do this

$ cd ~srees
$ cd .. # go one dir above dir you want to tar
$ tar cvf /tmp/srees.backup.tar srees

By convention, use .tar as the extension. To untar this file use

$ cd /tmp
$ tar xvf srees.backup.tar

tar untars things in the current directory!

After running the untar, you will find a new directory, /tmp/srees, that is a copy of your home directory.
Note that the way you tar things up dictates the directory structure when untarred.
The fact that I mentioned srees in the tar creation means that I'll have that dir when untarred.

In contrast, the following will also make a copy of my home directory, but without having a srees root dir:

$ cd ~srees
$ tar cvf /tmp/srees.backup.tar *

It is a good idea to tar things up with a root directory so that
when you untar you don't generate a million files in the current directly.

To see what's in a tarball, use

$ tar tvf /tmp/srees.backup.tar

Most of the time you can save space by using the z argument.

The tarball will then be gzip'd and you should use file extension .tar.gz:

$ cd ~srees
$ cd .. # go one dir above dir you want to tar
$ tar cvfz /tmp/srees.backup.tar.gz srees

Unzipping requires the z argument also:

$ cd /tmp
$ tar xvfz srees.backup.tar.gz

If you have a big file to compress, use gzip:

$ gzip bigfile

After execution, your file will have been renamed bigfile.gz.

To uncompress, use

$ gzip -d bigfile.gz


To display a text file that is currently gzip'd, use zcat:

$ zcat bigfile.gz