I am learning about the basics of Linux and archiving/compressing TAR files i have stumbled across tar -xvf and was wondering what it does. I have checked the man pages and know that x means extract and v means verbose but what does f do?
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5Possible duplicate of How to uncompress separated tgz files? kasper_341's answer– karelJul 21, 2019 at 6:12
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1man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tar.1.html Under "device selection and switching"; also the [-f ARCHIVE] in the usage lines are a good hint. See also how to search within a man page or view the man page on the web and use your browser search feature.– Jason CJul 21, 2019 at 15:44
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Possible duplicate of How to unzip .tgz file using the terminal?– MelebiusOct 9, 2019 at 14:19
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3 Answers
As the man page says, -f or --file= defines the ARCHIVE file from which to extract. It's in the chapter 'Device selection and switching' (line #561 in my version).
-f option in tar means that the next argument is the name of the target tar file. So after the -f option you can't place another option, for example the following syntax is wrong:
tar -xvf --verbose file.tar # Incorrect
The following variants should be correct:
tar -xvf file.tar --verbose
tar -xv --verbose -f file.tar
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2It might be interesting that, depending on your implementation and version of tar, and/or whatever option parsing library it uses,
tar -xfvmay or may not work. Jul 21, 2019 at 15:44 -
1unix.stackexchange.com/a/1283/57213
"-f" tells tar that the next parameter is the file name of the archive or STDOUT if it is "-"Jul 21, 2019 at 16:53 -
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-xvf is the short (unix style) version of
--extract --verbose --file=
As a new tar user one useful option to learn is -t (--test) in place of -x, which lists to the screen without actually extracting it.
-tvf
