5

I want to archive 3 folders, given their names in Ubuntu command prompt.
When I use tar -c abc tt zz -> it will do nothing.

radu florescu
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2 Answers2

10

You can use this command

 tar -cvzf tarname.tar.gz a b c

eg:

x@x:/tmp/aas$ touch a b c
x@x:/tmp/aas$ ls
a  b  c
x@x:/tmp/aas$ tar cvzf tarname.tar.gz a b c
a
b
c
x@x:/tmp/aas$ ls
a  b  c  tarname.tar.gz
x@x:/tmp/aas$ rm a b c
x@x:/tmp/aas$ ls
tarname.tar.gz
x@x:/tmp/aas$ gunzip -c tarname.tar.gz | tar xvf -
a
b
c
x@x:/tmp/aas$ ls
a  b  c  tarname.tar.gz
x@x:/tmp/aas$
daya
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6

You either need to redirect that output to your tarball name as in:

tar -c abc tt zz > tarball.tar

(Careful, that will overwrite tarball.tar if it's already there) or you need to use the -f flag for tar and specify a filename as in:

tar -cf tarball.tar abc tt zz
d34dh0r53
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    how about the use of gz? – radu florescu Jan 15 '12 at 10:57
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    if you add the `-z` flag to the tar command it will tell it to use gzip compression (e.g. `tar -czf tarball.tar.gz abc tt zz`), `-j` will use bzip2 (e.g. `tar -cjf tarball.tar.bz2 abc tt zz`). The way that tar handles it's output is the same whether or not compression is used. Without the `-f` it goes to `stdout`. – d34dh0r53 Jan 15 '12 at 11:01