The Linux tar (tape archive) command is used to convert a group of files into an archive.
An archive is a single file that contains any number of individual files plus information to allow them to be restored to their original form by one or more extraction programs.
To create a tar file from the contents of a folder, use the Linux tar command with the following options.
[root@RHEL2 mytar]# tar cvf mytar.tar mytar/
After creating a tar file, it can be compressed to save the storage space, by using gzip or bzip2 command. The following command shows how to compress the tar file with bzip2 command.
[root@RHEL2 mytar]# bzip2 -c mytar.tar > mytar.tar.bz2
To uncompress the bzip2 file, use the following command.
[root@RHEL2 mytar]# bzip2 –d mytar.tar.bz2
To extract the tar file back to its original contents use the following options with the tar command.
[root@RHEL2 mytar]# tar -xvf mytar.tar