How to Tar a File in UNIX

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to tar a file in UNIX. Let's open up our command line prompt. Here's our UNIX command line. If I do a directory listing, you'll see that I have multiple files in this folder. Let's create a test file that we're going to tar up. I'm just going to call it "myfile.txt". As you can see, if I do another directory listing, there's myfile.txt. I want to add that to our tar folder, which is basically going to be the UNIX version of a zip file. To do so, give the tar command, and then a space, a dash cf; for create; and then a space. And let's give it the name of the tar file we're going to create. I'm going to call it "mytar.tar", and then space. Give it the files that you want to add, myfile.txt. If I had more than one file, I would just do a space and list all the files here. But since I only have one, let's press enter. I gave it the wrong file name. So let's clear that and say "myfile.txt". Now if I do a directory listing, you will see that the mytar.tar has been created. And if I extracted it, it would include myfile.txt. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to create a tar file in UNIX."