Create a tar file of an entire directory and its sub-directories

November 2nd, 2005

To create a tar archive of an entire directory including all files and sub-directories:

tar -cvf mytarfile.tar mydir/

5 Responses to “Create a tar file of an entire directory and its sub-directories”

John Says:
July 15th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

tar -cvfz mytarfile.tgz mydir/ will also compress the directory (gzip)

Also … for a more universally compatible file try
# zip -rv9 myzipfile.zip /mydir

-9 is for maximum compression
-v is for verbose output
-r is recursive directories

George Says:
May 19th, 2008 at 10:45 am

The problem with the zip format is that it does not store file permissions.

I thank you so muhc for putting this code up. I can never remember it and always load this page when I need to make a backup.

Do you have any good ways to just get one file out of the tar file?

using

tar -cvfz mytarfile.tgz mydir/

returns
tar: mytarfile.tgz: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

so use it without dash in the beginning of the command as in:

tar cvfz mytarfile.tgz mydir/

and it works beautifully.

tony spencer - aka notsleepy