NOTE: this website is out of date. This is the course web site from a past quarter. If you are a current student taking the course, you should visit the current class web site instead. If the current website is not yet visible by going to cs107.stanford.edu, it may be accessible by visiting this link until the new page is mounted at this address. Please be advised that courses' policies change with each new quarter and instructor, and any information on this out-of-date page may not apply to you.
Written by Chris Gregg, with modifications by Nick Troccoli
Click here for a walkthrough video.
Although you won't directly use it in CS107, sometimes you will find files on a linux system that have the extension ".tgz" or ".tar.gz". These are compressed (like "zipped") files, and you use the tar ("Tape ARchive", from back when we routinely used magnetic tape to keep backups program to extract the files.
The easiest way to un-tar a file is to use the command with the -xvf flags:
$ tar -xvf file.tar.gz
...lots of files
$
To create an archive file that is compressed, use the -czvf flags:
$ tar -czvf file.tar.gz someFolder
...lots of files added
$