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One of the basic operations of tar is --create (-c), which you use to create a tar archive. We will explain --create first because, in order to learn about the other operations, you will find it useful to have an archive available to practice on.
To make this easier, in this section you will first create a directory containing three files. Then, we will show you how to create an archive (inside the new directory). Both the directory, and the archive are specifically for you to practice on. The rest of this chapter and the next chapter will show many examples using this directory and the files you will create: some of those files may be other directories and other archives.
The three files you will archive in this example are called blues, folk, and jazz. The archive is called collection.tar.
This section will proceed slowly, detailing how to use --create
in verbose mode, and showing examples using both short and long
forms. In the rest of the tutorial, and in the examples in the next
chapter, we will proceed at a slightly quicker pace. This section
moves more slowly to allow beginning users to understand how
tar works.