====== Compress Entire Directory to tar archive ======
<color #db5f0b>Jul 2017</color>
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<color #ed1c24>tar</color> files are compressed files that contain all files and folders from a given location. The advantage to using .tar files, other than the obvious (potential) space saving is that you can include all file/folder permissions in the <color #ed1c24>.tar</color> file that would potentially be lost if you were doing a straight copy.
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==== Create .tar File ====
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The basic syntax for tar is quite simple, here is an example:
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    tar -switches xxx.tar.gz ABC
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There are many switches available for .tar, but the main ones we will be using are:
<file>
p == preserve permissions
c == create archive
v == verbose (print names while making tar)
z == gzip
f == tar file name
</file>
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To create a <color #ed1c24>.tar</color> archive, where the file name is archive.tar and the target folder is /home/work we would use the following syntax.
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    tar -pcvzf archive.tar /home/work
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==== Decompress .tar File ====
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To decompress the <color #ed1c24>.tar</color> file, we use the same tar command, we must use the same switches if we wish to preserve the file/folder structure and the file/folder permissions (permissions are very important).
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To decompress the archive.tar file we created earlier, use the following command:
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    tar -pcvzf archive.tar
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