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GNU tar

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1 Some Definitions
1.2 What tar Does
1.3 How tar Archives are Named
1.4 POSIX Compliance
1.5 GNU tar Authors
1.6 Reporting bugs or suggestions

2. Tutorial Introduction to tar

2.1 Basic tar Operations and Options
2.2 The Three Most Frequently Used Operations
2.3 Two Frequently Used Options

The `--file' Option
The `--verbose' Option
Getting Help: Using the --help Option

2.4 How to Create Archives

2.4.1 Preparing a Practice Directory for Examples
2.4.2 Creating the Archive
2.4.3 Running `--create' with `--verbose'
2.4.4 Short Forms with `create'
2.4.5 Archiving Directories

2.5 How to List Archives

Listing the Contents of a Stored Directory

2.6 How to Extract Members from an Archive

2.6.1 Extracting an Entire Archive
2.6.2 Extracting Specific Files
2.6.3 Extracting Files that are Directories
2.6.4 Commands That Will Fail

2.7 Going Further Ahead in this Manual

3. Invoking GNU tar

3.1 General Synopsis of tar
3.2 Using tar Options
3.3 The Three Option Styles

3.3.1 Mnemonic Option Style
3.3.2 Short Option Style
3.3.3 Old Option Style
3.3.4 Mixing Option Styles

3.4 All tar Options

3.4.1 Operations
3.4.2 tar Options
3.4.3 Short Options Cross Reference

3.5 GNU tar documentation
3.6 Checking tar progress
3.7 Asking for Confirmation During Operations

4. GNU tar Operations

4.1 Basic GNU tar Operations
4.2 Advanced GNU tar Operations

4.2.1 The Five Advanced tar Operations
4.2.2 The Current State of the Practice Files
4.2.3 How to Add Files to Existing Archives: --append

4.2.3.1 Appending Files to an Archive
4.2.3.2 Multiple Files with the Same Name

4.2.4 Updating an Archive

4.2.4.1 How to Update an Archive Using --update

4.2.5 Combining Archives with --concatenate
4.2.6 Removing Archive Members Using `--delete'
4.2.7 Comparing Archive Members with the File System

4.3 Options Used by --extract

4.3.1 Options to Help Read Archives

Reading Full Records
Ignoring Blocks of Zeros
Ignore Fail Read

4.3.2 Changing How tar Writes Files

Options to Prevent Overwriting Files
Keep Old Files
Unlink First
Recursive Unlink
Setting Modification Times
Setting Access Permissions
Writing to Standard Output
Removing Files

4.3.3 Coping with Scarce Resources

Starting File
Same Order

4.4 Backup options
4.5 Notable tar Usages
4.6 Looking Ahead: The Rest of this Manual

5. Performing Backups and Restoring Files

5.1 Using tar to Perform Full Dumps
5.2 Using tar to Perform Incremental Dumps
5.3 The Incremental Options
5.4 Levels of Backups
5.5 Setting Parameters for Backups and Restoration

5.5.1 An Example Text of `Backup-specs'
5.5.2 Syntax for `Backup-specs'

5.6 Using the Backup Scripts
5.7 Using the Restore Script

6. Choosing Files and Names for tar

6.1 Choosing and Naming Archive Files
6.2 Selecting Archive Members
6.3 Reading Names from a File

NUL Terminated File Names

6.4 Excluding Some Files

Problems with Using the exclude Options

6.5 Wildcards Patterns and Matching
6.6 Operating Only on New Files
6.7 Descending into Directories
6.8 Crossing Filesystem Boundaries

6.8.1 Changing the Working Directory
6.8.2 Absolute File Names

7. Date input formats

7.1 General date syntax
7.2 Calendar date item
7.3 Time of day item
7.4 Timezone item
7.5 Day of week item
7.6 Relative item in date strings
7.7 Pure numbers in date strings
7.8 Authors of getdate

8. Controlling the Archive Format

8.1 Making tar Archives More Portable

8.1.1 Portable Names
8.1.2 Symbolic Links
8.1.3 Old V7 Archives
8.1.4 GNU tar and POSIX tar
8.1.5 Checksumming Problems

8.2 Using Less Space through Compression

8.2.1 Creating and Reading Compressed Archives
8.2.2 Archiving Sparse Files

8.3 Handling File Attributes
8.4 The Standard Format
8.5 GNU Extensions to the Archive Format
8.6 Comparison of tar and cpio

9. Tapes and Other Archive Media

9.1 Device Selection and Switching
9.2 The Remote Tape Server
9.3 Some Common Problems and their Solutions
9.4 Blocking

9.4.1 Format Variations
9.4.2 The Blocking Factor of an Archive

9.5 Many Archives on One Tape

9.5.1 Tape Positions and Tape Marks
9.5.2 The mt Utility

9.6 Using Multiple Tapes

9.6.1 Archives Longer than One Tape or Disk
9.6.2 Tape Files

9.7 Including a Label in the Archive
9.8 Verifying Data as It is Stored
9.9 Write Protection

Index