I have some questions about tar - I am confused...

What exactly does tar do?

I used tar cvf tarfile file1 and I get the following
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 12587520 Jun 17 10:59 file1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 12587520 Jun 17 11:04 tarfile

Both files appear same in size etc...
I see tar used to write files to tape but you can just write a file to tape directly if thats the case. What is the advantage of tar?


Maybe a stupid question with a simple answer but I would appreciate comments...

Try

tar -cvf filename.tar filenameordirectoryyouaretarring

tar -tvf filename.tar

tar -xvf filename.tar

the advantage of tar is to include many files and subdirectories in one file. if you are using the orig tar from solaris the tar will not compress the files like gnu tar or zip.....

g P

Also an advantage of using tar is all *NIX systems have tar. So moving files between them is easy to do as one tar file instead of heaps of smaller files.

Tar is used for compressing files, grouping together files, can be sued for backups etc.

If you tar something up and what to untar it in a Windws system then use winrar.

man tar .............:-)

If it's compression you're after, then gzip the resulting tar file.

If you're using GNU tar, the z option will do this for you at the same time as file creation.

You can untar a gzipped tar file easily with
zcat my_file.tar.gz | tar xvf -

or with GNU tar, in one fell swoop
tar xvzf my_file.tar.gz

As the poster above said, man tar.

I'll also say, man gzip.

Cheers
ZB