I often have large directories that I want to transfer to a local computer from a server. Instead of using recursive scp or rsync on the directory itself, I’ll often tar and gzip it first and then transfer it.
When using tar I always include -f in the parameters but I have no idea why.
Assume i have an gzip compressed tar-ball compressedArchive.tgz (+100 files, totaling +5gb).
Consider a single tar file from an external system which contains some directories with various attributes which I want to retain such as permissions, mtimes, etc. How can I easily take a subset of these files as a regular user (not root)?
I’d like to essentially tar/gz a directory on a remote machine and save the file to my local computer without having to connect back into my local machine from the remote one. Is there a way to do this over SSH? The tar file doesn’t need to be stored on the remote machine, only on the local machine. Is this possible?
I’d like to download, and extract an archive under a given directory. Here is how I’ve been doing it so far:
I’m trying to compress a folder (/var/www/) to ~/www_backups/$time.tar where $time is the current date.
So I need to compress a directory with max compression.
I usually assumed that tar was a compression utility, but I am unsure, does it actually compress files, or is it just like an ISO file, a file to hold files?
I’ve always used GNU tar. However, all GNU/Linux distributions that I’ve seen ship bsdtar in their repositories. I’ve even seen it installed by default in some, IIRC. I know for sure that Arch GNU/Linux requires it as a part of basedevel (maybe base, but I’m not sure), as I’ve seen it in PKGBUILDs.