Tar

Question 1

What does tar stand for?

Answer 1

tape archive

Question 2

tar can quickly join together multiple files into one larger file, while still preserving ______.

Answer 2

meta-data such as Unix permissions

Question 3

By default, tar does not compress files, but it does have a flag that will compress the archive using ____.

Answer 3

gzip

Question 4

A very simple archive built using tar is called a _____.

Answer 4

tarball

Question 5

How would we create a tarball of all of the files in the tools directory?

Answer 5

tar -c tools/

Question 6

What is the “gibberish” preceding each of the files that make up a tarball?

Answer 6

Unix meta-data of that file; including such things as the permissions, file’s owner, group, etc.

Question 7

If you don’t use the -f flag when using tar, where does the archive go?

Answer 7

It’s printed to stdout, which is useful when you want to pipe the output of the archive into another command.

Question 8

How would you create a tarball and save it to a file?

Answer 8

tar -cf foo.tar tools/

[command] [flags] [file to be created] [directory]

Question 9

What flag can we use to see which files are being added to the archive?

Answer 9

-v

verbose mode

Question 10

How can we pass multiple directories to the tar command?

Answer 10

just tack them on at the end

Question 11

How can we create a tarball from a list of files generated by a find command?

Answer 11

find . -name *.gemspec | tar -cvf gemspecs.tar -T -

• T flag reads in a list of file names from another file
• tells tars that it should read in the list of files from the find query

Question 12

What does the -T flag do?

Answer 12

Reads in a list of file names from another file.

Question 13

How can you list the files in an existing archive?

Answer 13

using the -t flag

tar -tf foo.tar

Question 14

How can we append additional files to a non-compressed archive?

Answer 14

with the -r flag

tar -rvf foo.tar Gemfile README.md

Question 15

How can we update a specific file within an uncompressed archive?

Answer 15

with the -u flag

tar -uvf foo.tar version.rb

Question 16

What flag do we use to extract all of the files into the current directory?

Answer 16

-x

tar -xvf foo.tar

Question 17

How can we extract a single file from the archive?

Answer 17

tar -xvf foo.tar rails.gemspec

list the file name(s) after the command and arguments

Question 18

How can we extract files to a different directory?

Answer 18

using the -C flag

tar -xvf foo.tar -C ./myfolder

Question 19

Which three compression algorithms does tar provide?

Answer 19

gzip (-z)
bzip2 (-j)
unix compress (-Z)

Question 20

What is the convention for showing that a file has been compressed?

Answer 20

appending .gz to the end of the archive’s name

Question 21

How would we create a compressed archive from “ar.tar”

Answer 21

tar -zf ar.tar.gz

tar flags name.gz

Question 22

How can we extract files from a compressed archive?

Answer 22

add the -z flag to the extract command so that it first uncompresses the archive and then extracts the files:

tar -xvzf ar.tar.gz