How to compress / extract tar files on Linux

Introduction

Problem description

Often the zip files have quite bad compression rate, or they have permission issues on Linux machines.

As a standard compress option, tar files have quite nice compression rate and speed on Linux systems.

1. GUI method to compress

1. Right-click on the folder / file, and choose compress.

2. The zip options are displayed, select the tar.xz option.

2. Terminal method to compress

You may also utilize the following command as an option to zip a file or directory:

tar -zcvf <name>.tar.gz <target_directory>

Compress into divided segments in specific situations when the individual compressed file is excessively large (e.g. divide the compressed files into 1024MB segments):

tar -cvj large-files.avi | split -b 1024m -d - "large-split.tar.bz."

3. Extract

tar -zxvf archive_name.tar.gz

To extract connected sections of compressed file:

cat large-split.tar.xz.* | tar -xzvf -

Note: the tar compress option has different variations, for example .gz, .xz, .bz. etc. Please change accordingly to your specific file type.

FAQ