Tar

GNU tar is an archiver tool that provides the ability to create tar archives, as well as various other kinds of manipulation. The three most used functions are storage, backup and transportation. Five more advanced operations are: --append, --update, --concatenate, --delete and --compare. In addition, tar supports many kinds of compression, among others: gzip, bzip2, lzip, lzma, lzop, xz and gz.

Emerge
After adjusting USE flags:

Environment variables
displays by default the short tar option summary. This summary is organized by groups. The exact visual representation of the help output is configurable via ARGP_HELP_FMT environment variable. For mor information please refer to GNU's tar manual

help
Most of the tar operations and options can be written in any of three forms: long, short and old style.

Creation
or

Listing
or

Extraction
or

Additional options

 * To specify the name of an archive:

or


 * For showing the files being worked on as tar is running:

or

For additional information refer to Official documentation

Compression
In order to create a compressed tar file, also known as 'tarball', there are many ways, but the best one may be:

or

This option will select the compression program based on the suffix of the archive file name. For example:

This command will produce a bz2 tarball, while:

will produce a lzma tarball.

Additional information
Because of the wide number of tar's options is not possible to cover all the advanced features of this programm on a single wiki entry. Some of the more advanced features include.


 * Add files to existing archives
 * Updating an archive
 * Options used by
 * Performing backups and restoring files
 * Excluding some files
 * Crossing File System Boundaries

This information and more is available in the GNU tar manual

External resources

 * GNU tar: an archiver tool (official)