How to create a .tar.gz file on Linux

By mkyong | Updated: May 29, 2021

Viewed: 13,745 (+95 pv/w)

Tags: compress file gzip linux tar uncompress file zip

A few examples to show the use of tar command to create a .tar.gz file on Linux.

Table of contents

• 1. Create, list and extract a .tar.gz file
• 2. What is tarball or .tar.gz?
• 3. Create a .tar.gz file
  • 3.1 Tar and compress a file
  • 3.2 Tar and compress multiple files
  • 3.3 Tar and compress multiple files and folders.
• 4. Extract the .tar.gz file
  • 4.1 Extract the .tar.gz file to current directory
  • 4.2 Extract the .tar.gz file to a specified directory
• 5. References

1. Create, list and extract a .tar.gz file

We use -c to create a .tar.gz file.

$ tar -cvzf example.tar.gz {files or folders to tar and compress}  

We use -tf to list the content of a .tar.gz file.

$ tar -tf example.tar.gz

We use -x to extract a .tar.gz file.

$ tar -xvzf example.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf example.tar.gz -C {path}

2. What is tarball or .tar.gz?

On Linux or macOS, there is a tar command to group files and folders into one archive file, aka tarball or a .tar file, and later, we can compress the tarball to reduce the file size, the standard compress algorithm is gzipping or .gz file.

For example, below are two text files.

  a.txt b.txt

We can group the above files into one .tar file or tarball.

  a.txt b.txt  --> tar --> example.tar (100MB)

And we compress the above tar file to reduce the file size.

  example.tar --> gzip --> example.tar.gz (50MB)

3. Create a .tar.gz file

Below are some tar options to create a .tar.gz file.

• -c to tar a few files or folders
• -z to gzip compress the tar file
• -f to give a file name
• -v to verbose output (optional)

The final command is tar -cvzf filename.tar.gz {files} {folders}.

Below are two text files for testing.

ls -lsa
total 16
0 drwxr-xr-x   4 yongmookkim  staff  128 May 29 17:41 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  12 yongmookkim  staff  384 May 29 17:35 ..
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff    6 May 29 17:35 a.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff   12 May 29 17:36 b.txt

3.1 Tar and compress a file

Below example tar a single file a.txt and compress it using gzip and output it to example.tar.gz.

$ tar -czf example.tar.gz a.txt

$ ls -lsah
total 24
0 drwxr-xr-x   5 yongmookkim  staff   160B May 29 17:43 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  12 yongmookkim  staff   384B May 29 17:35 ..
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff     6B May 29 17:35 a.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff    12B May 29 17:36 b.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff   123B May 29 17:43 example.tar.gz

# list the content of the tar.gz file
$ tar -tf example.tar.gz
a.txt

3.2 Tar and compress multiple files

Below tar command tar multiple files a.txt and b.txt and compress it using gzip and output it to example2.tar.gz.

$ tar -czf example2.tar.gz a.txt b.txt

$ ls -lsa
total 32
0 drwxr-xr-x   6 yongmookkim  staff  192 May 29 17:46 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  12 yongmookkim  staff  384 May 29 17:35 ..
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff    6 May 29 17:35 a.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff   12 May 29 17:36 b.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff  156 May 29 17:46 example2.tar.gz

$ tar -tf example2.tar.gz
a.txt
b.txt

3.3 Tar and compress multiple files and folders.

Review the current directory structure.

$ tree
.
├── a.txt
├── b.txt
└── folderA
  ├── c.txt
  └── folderB
      └── d.txt

We want to tar and compress a.txt file and folderA directory and its subdirectories and subfiles and output it to example3.tar.gz.

$ ls -lsah
total 16
0 drwxr-xr-x   5 yongmookkim  staff   160B May 29 17:50 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  12 yongmookkim  staff   384B May 29 17:35 ..
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff     6B May 29 17:35 a.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff    12B May 29 17:36 b.txt
0 drwxr-xr-x   4 yongmookkim  staff   128B May 29 17:50 folderA

$ tar cvzf example3.tar.gz a.txt folderA
a a.txt
a folderA
a folderA/folderB
a folderA/c.txt
a folderA/folderB/d.txt

$ ls -lsah
total 24
0 drwxr-xr-x   6 yongmookkim  staff   192B May 29 17:54 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  12 yongmookkim  staff   384B May 29 17:35 ..
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff     6B May 29 17:35 a.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff    12B May 29 17:36 b.txt
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff   240B May 29 17:54 example3.tar.gz
0 drwxr-xr-x   4 yongmookkim  staff   128B May 29 17:50 folderA

$ tar -tf example3.tar.gz
a.txt
folderA/
folderA/folderB/
folderA/c.txt
folderA/folderB/d.txt

4. Extract the .tar.gz file

Below are some tar options to uncompress, unzip or untar a .tar.gz file.

• -x to extract the tar file
• -z to gzip uncompress the tar file
• -f to give a file name
• -v for the detail (optional)

The final command to extract the .tar.gz is tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz.

4.1 Extract the .tar.gz file to current directory

By default, the -x will extract the files or folders to the current directory running the command.

$ ls -lsah
total 8
0 drwxr-xr-x  3 yongmookkim  staff    96B May 29 21:31 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  6 yongmookkim  staff   192B May 29 21:31 ..
8 -rw-r--r--  1 yongmookkim  staff   240B May 29 17:54 example3.tar.gz

$ tar -xvzf example3.tar.gz
x a.txt
x folderA/
x folderA/folderB/
x folderA/c.txt
x folderA/folderB/d.txt

$ ls -lsah
total 16
0 drwxr-xr-x  5 yongmookkim  staff   160B May 29 21:36 .
0 drwxr-xr-x  6 yongmookkim  staff   192B May 29 21:31 ..
8 -rw-r--r--  1 yongmookkim  staff     6B May 29 17:35 a.txt
8 -rw-r--r--  1 yongmookkim  staff   240B May 29 17:54 example3.tar.gz
0 drwxr-xr-x  4 yongmookkim  staff   128B May 29 17:50 folderA

4.2 Extract the .tar.gz file to a specified directory

We can add a -C DIR to change to a specified directory and do the extract operation next, which means extract the content of .tar.gz to a specified directory.

The below example extracts the content of example3.tar.gz to this directory /home/mkyong/backup.

$ tar -xvzf example3.tar.gz -C /home/mkyong/backup
x a.txt
x folderA/
x folderA/folderB/
x folderA/c.txt
x folderA/folderB/d.txt

$ ls -lsa /home/mkyong/backup
total 8
0 drwxr-xr-x   4 yongmookkim  staff   128 May 29 21:42 .
0 drwxr-xr-x+ 38 yongmookkim  staff  1216 May 29 21:42 ..
8 -rw-r--r--   1 yongmookkim  staff     6 May 29 17:35 a.txt
0 drwxr-xr-x   4 yongmookkim  staff   128 May 29 17:50 folderA

5. References

• Wikipedia – tar
• How to password protect gzip files on the command line?
• How to backup a website to Amazon S3 using shell script
• How to create tar.gz in Java