tar Cheatsheet

A tar cheatsheet for the flags you always forget: create, extract, and list archives, plus the gzip/bzip2/xz compression variants — copy-ready with editable file names.

Explain a command

Create

Create a .tar.gz archive
tar -czf .tar.gz
Create an uncompressed .tar
tar -cf .tar
Create a .tar.xz (smaller, slower)
tar -cJf .tar.xz
Create, excluding a pattern
tar --exclude= -czf .tar.gz

Extract

Extract a .tar.gz here
tar -xzf .tar.gz
Extract any tar (auto-detect compression)
tar -xf
Extract into a specific directory
tar -xzf .tar.gz -C
Extract a single file/dir
tar -xzf .tar.gz

List & inspect

List archive contents
tar -tzf .tar.gz
List with sizes and permissions
tar -tvzf .tar.gz

Variants

Create a .tar.bz2
tar -cjf .tar.bz2
Create and print each file added
tar -czvf .tar.gz

12 commands. Copy-ready with editable placeholders — everything runs in your browser, nothing is sent to a server.