GNU tar 1.32: Table of Contents

1. Introduction
- 1.1 What this Book Contains
- 1.2 Some Definitions
- 1.3 What tar Does
- 1.4 How tar Archives are Named
- 1.5 GNU tar Authors
- 1.6 Reporting bugs or suggestions
2. Tutorial Introduction to tar
- 2.1 Assumptions this Tutorial Makes
- 2.2 Stylistic Conventions
- 2.3 Basic tar Operations and Options
- 2.4 The Three Most Frequently Used Operations
- 2.5 Two Frequently Used Options
- 2.6 How to Create Archives
- 2.7 How to List Archives
  - Listing the Contents of a Stored Directory
- 2.8 How to Extract Members from an Archive
- 2.9 Going Further Ahead in this Manual
3. Invoking GNU tar
- 3.1 General Synopsis of tar
- 3.2 Using tar Options
- 3.3 The Three Option Styles
- 3.4 All tar Options
- 3.5 GNU tar documentation
- 3.6 Obtaining GNU tar default values
- 3.7 Checking tar progress
- 3.8 Checkpoints
- 3.9 Controlling Warning Messages
- 3.10 Asking for Confirmation During Operations
- 3.11 Running External Commands
4. GNU tar Operations
- 4.1 Basic GNU tar Operations
- 4.2 Advanced GNU tar Operations
- 4.3 Options Used by `--create'
- 4.4 Options Used by `--extract'
- 4.5 Backup options
- 4.6 Looking Ahead: The Rest of this Manual
5. Performing Backups and Restoring Files
- 5.1 Using tar to Perform Full Dumps
- 5.2 Using tar to Perform Incremental Dumps
- 5.3 Levels of Backups
- 5.4 Setting Parameters for Backups and Restoration
- 5.5 Using the Backup Scripts
- 5.6 Using the Restore Script
6. Choosing Files and Names for tar
- 6.1 Choosing and Naming Archive Files
- 6.2 Selecting Archive Members
- 6.3 Reading Names from a File
  - 6.3.1 NUL-Terminated File Names
- 6.4 Excluding Some Files
  - Problems with Using the exclude Options
- 6.5 Wildcards Patterns and Matching
  - Controlling Pattern-Matching
- 6.6 Quoting Member Names
- 6.7 Modifying File and Member Names
- 6.8 Operating Only on New Files
- 6.9 Descending into Directories
- 6.10 Crossing File System Boundaries
  - 6.10.1 Changing the Working Directory
  - 6.10.2 Absolute File Names
7. Date input formats
- 7.1 General date syntax
- 7.2 Calendar date items
- 7.3 Time of day items
- 7.4 Time zone items
- 7.5 Combined date and time of day items
- 7.6 Day of week items
- 7.7 Relative items in date strings
- 7.8 Pure numbers in date strings
- 7.9 Seconds since the Epoch
- 7.10 Specifying time zone rules
- 7.11 Authors of parse_datetime
8. Controlling the Archive Format
- 8.1 Using Less Space through Compression
  - 8.1.1 Creating and Reading Compressed Archives
    - 8.1.1.1 Using lbzip2 with GNU tar.
  - 8.1.2 Archiving Sparse Files
- 8.2 Handling File Attributes
- 8.3 Making tar Archives More Portable
- 8.4 Comparison of tar and cpio
9. Tapes and Other Archive Media
- 9.1 Device Selection and Switching
- 9.2 Remote Tape Server
- 9.3 Some Common Problems and their Solutions
- 9.4 Blocking
  - 9.4.1 Format Variations
  - 9.4.2 The Blocking Factor of an Archive
- 9.5 Many Archives on One Tape
  - 9.5.1 Tape Positions and Tape Marks
  - 9.5.2 The mt Utility
- 9.6 Using Multiple Tapes
- 9.7 Including a Label in the Archive
- 9.8 Verifying Data as It is Stored
- 9.9 Write Protection
10. Reliability and Security
- 10.1 Reliability
- 10.2 Security
A. Changes
B. Recipes
- B.1 Copying directory hierarchies
- B.2 Restoring Intermediate Directories
C. Configuring Help Summary
D. Fixing Snapshot Files
E. Tar Internals
- Basic Tar Format
- GNU Extensions to the Archive Format
- Storing Sparse Files
- Format of the Incremental Snapshot Files
- Dumpdir
F. Genfile
- F.1 Generate Mode
- F.2 Status Mode
- F.3 Exec Mode
G. Free Software Needs Free Documentation
H. GNU Free Documentation License
I. Index of Command Line Options
J. Index