Comments on: tar — how to create and extract tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives

By: Vamsi

Vamsi — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:45:54 +0000

Awesome !
very good coverage of the tar command..

By: George Baker

George Baker — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:57:13 +0000

While I was backing up a partition on a system I got the following message:

outbound2.img: file changed as we read it

my question is did it stop reading the file at that point or did it continue reading the rest of the file, or did it start over on that file? And finally, how did it know that the file changed?

Thanks

By: Vinny

Vinny — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 21:23:47 +0000

Very useful!
Thanks and cheers from Brazil!

By: spacerat

spacerat — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 13:15:23 +0000

well it's because f needs to be followed by a filename, so it has to stay at the end. If it works both ways the your tar has probably been patched.

By: anurag

anurag — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:17:28 +0000

thnks for the beautiful representation of the info.

By: Kamil

Kamil — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:39:14 +0000

hi sindikat, I am using GNU tar 1.20 and both 'tar xjf foo.tar.bz2' and 'tar xfj foo.tar.bz2' work fine for me.

By: sindikat

sindikat — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 03:41:09 +0000

when i try to run

$ tar xfj foo.tar.bz2

instead of

$ tar xjf foo.tar.bz2

it throws an error:

tar: j: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I'm using GNU tar 1.23

By: majkel d?ekson

majkel d?ekson — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:07:47 +0000

Super, dzieki Kamil!

By: Kamil

Kamil — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:38:28 +0000

Fixed. Thanks Zim.

By: Zim

Zim — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:51:27 +0000

"To further encode it using gzip compression the j option is also added"

I believe that should be the "z" option

By: Xeleema

Xeleema — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:08:46 +0000

Also, for those of us who find ourselves without a GNU version of tar present;

compress (passthru with bzip2 or gzip )
tar cvf - dirname | bzip2 -9 - > dirname.tar.bz2

uncompress
bzip2 -d

By: Kamil

Kamil — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 02:38:10 +0000

Thanks correct, I have dropped the minus sign all together. I do mention that the j and z flags are optional when extracting archives (under the Extracting archives section). Cheers, Kamil

By: correct

correct — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 02:29:47 +0000

GNU tar does not require you to pass the minus sign for options, it is redundant.

Also,

recent (within the last few years) versions of GNU tar (as shipped for the majority of GNU/Linux distros) do not require you to specify the z or j flag when extracting archives

eg instead of tar xfz foo.tar.gz or tar xfj foo.tar.bz2 you can simply say

tar xf foo.tar.gz

or
tar xf foo.tar.bz2