Using tar and gzip

Sometimes, we want to pack a full directory (including files) into a single file for backup purposes or to simply share it more easily. The command that can help aggregate files into one is tar.

First, we need to install tar:

[root@rhel-instance ~]# yum install tar -y

We can try by creating (as root) a backup of the /etc directory branch:

[root@rhel-instance ~]# tar -cf etc-backup.tar /etc
tar: Removing leading '/' from member names
[root@rhel-instance ~]# ls -lh etc-backup.tar
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 20M Feb 17 20:08 etc-backup.tar

Let's check the options used:

• -c: Short for create. tar can put files together but also unpack them.
• -f: Short for file. We specify that the next parameter will be working with a file.

We can try to unpack it:

[root@rhel-instance ~]# mkdir tmp
[root@rhel-instance ~]# cd tmp/
[root@rhel-instance tmp]# tar -xf ../etc-backup.tar
[root@rhel-instance tmp]# ls
etc

Let’s check the...