cheat sheets.

CREATING

To tar and gzip a directory and save the newly created file in the same
directory:
$ tar czf dirnamee.tgz dirname

Another example which
  a) starts from inside the directory being tarred and saves the new file one
  level up
  b) pipes through gzip instead of using tar's own gzip facility
     (which is handy if you want to use special gzip flags, or use zip instead
     of gzip)
$ tar cf - . | gzip > ../dirname.tgz

Here we use the -j flag to use bzip instead of gzip:
$ tar -cjf home.tar.bz2 home

Here we use long tags:
$ tar --create --verbose --preserve \
      --ignore-failed-read --file=<file to write to> <files to tar>


EXTRACTING

Extract an archive (with decompression)
$ tar -xvzf myfile.tar.gz

To extract, first change to the location you want the files (ie. create the
outermost
directory of the archive and then cd to it) and then:

$ tar zxvf /some/path/filename.tgz
(use j instead of z for bzip files)


FILE EXTENSIONS

.tgz is equivalent to .tar.gz
.tbz and .tb2 are equivalent to .tar.bz2
.taz is equivalent to .tar.Z
.tlz is equivalent to .tar.lz
.txz is equivalent to .tar.xz


COMMON ARGUMENTS

$ tar -j (--bzip)
$ tar -v (--verbose)
$ tar -z (--gzip)
$ tar -x (--extract)
$ tar -c (--create)
$ tar -t (--list)
$ tar -f (--file)
$ tar -p (--preserve)
$ tar --ignore-failed-read
$ tar --totals (prints total bytes written with --create.