Create a tar.gz file using tar command:

tar -zcvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz source-folder-name

-z: The z option is very important and tells the tar command to uncompress the file (gzip).

-c: I don't know! If you know what it does please tell me. Thank you.

-v: The “v” stands for “verbose.” This option will list all of the files one by one in the archive.

-f: This options tells tar that you are going to give it a file name to work with.


This will compress the contents of source-folder-name to a tar.gz archive named tar-archive-name.tar.gz


To extract a tar.gz compressed archive you can use the following command:

tar -zxvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz

-x: This option tells tar to extract the files.


This will extract the archive to the folder tar-archive-name.

#linux #tar #targz #zip #compress

In order to compress a file with level of 9 (maximum level of compression), you need to
set an ENV variable. In order to not clobber the file system environments you can use pipe in your command:

tar cvf - /path/to/directory | gzip -9 - > file.tar.gz

#tar #gzip #compression_level

tarfile is a python library to read and write gzip`/`bz2 compressed files.

How to read a gzip compressed tar archive and display some member information:

import tarfile
 tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz", "r:gz")
 for tarinfo in tar:
     print tarinfo.name, "is", tarinfo.size, "bytes in size and is",
     if tarinfo.isreg():
         print "a regular file."
     elif tarinfo.isdir():
         print "a directory."
     else:
         print "something else."
 tar.close()

Create a compressed file:

with tarfile.open(dst, "w:gz") as tar:
     print("Archiving " + src + " into " + dst)
     tar.add(src, arcname = os.path.basename(src))

NOTE: the flag of w:gz opens the destination in write mode. Used to create a new tar file.

#python #tarfile #tar #bz2 #gzip