Tarfiles

A tarfile is a file made by the Unix utility tar. This is a way of packaging together many files as one file for distribution (tarfiles are also often compressed before being distributed).

In order to unpack a tarfile, save it into a file called, say, foo.tar and then type the following Unix command.

tar xvf foo.tar

This will recover the file and directory structure of all the files within the tarfile as they were when the tarfile was created (usually, though not always, as files and subdirectories within the current directory).

If you want to know what is in a tarfile before unpacking it, type the following Unix command.

tar tvf foo.tar

For more information, see the Unix man page for tar.