Internal

Options

When tar is executed as root, the file permissions and owner are preserved.

Preserve permissions, default when the root executes the command.

Preserve order (same order). Sort names to extract to match archive.

Compress, produce a tgz.archive.

Source directory.

Archive maintaining the user IDs and file permissions:

tar -cvspf .../archive.tar *

Note that the name of the archive file to be created must immediately follow -f, without any interceding parameters.

To also gzip:

tar cfv - ./mydir | gzip > mydir.tgz

Restore preserving the user ID and file permissions (if done as root, the behavior is implicit):

tar -xvspf .../archive.tar

tar -xf archive.tar some/specific/file.txt

gunzip < ... | tar xfv - some/specific/file.txt