Problem

You want to make some backups with tar.

Solution

tar is very functional and has many uses.

Example

If you are lucky enough to have GNU tar (tar –version will return GNU if so), then you can compress and backup at the same time. 🙂

tar zcvf /tmp/filename.tgz .

This backups and zips the contents of the current directory, to filename.tgz in tmp directory.

If not – no drama. This will backup and pipe through content to gzip, which then zips it.

tar cvf - . | gzip --best > /tmp/filename.tgz

Recreate a directory:

mkdir new

tar -C old -cf - . | tar -C new -xvf

Restore over the network:

ssh remote_hostname "(tar -cf - remote_directory)" | tar -xvf -

For example:

ssh bree "(tar -cf - Perl_Bin)" | tar -xvf -

Reference

[tags]tar, backups, restores, Unix Coding School[/tags]

• Linux Man Pages – tar command
• Linux Man Pages – ssh command
• Linux Man Pages – gzip command