Notable tar Usages

From the gnu.org site:

For example, here is how you might copy a directory's contents from one disk to another, while preserving the dates, modes, owners and link-structure of all the files therein. In this case, the transfer medium is a pipe, which is one a Unix redirection mechanism:

$ cd sourcedir; tar -cf - . | (cd targetdir; tar -xf -)

Here's a sample: sudo tar cvzf /media/MyBook500-ext3/Volume/home-2007-10-20.tgz /home/

Copying Directory Trees with (tar | tar)

The tar command isn't just for tape archives. It can copy files from disk to disk, too. And even if your computer has cp -r there are advantages to using tar.

Copy a Directory using tar

Another way to copy directory hierarchies is to use the tar utility, described in section 6.3.7. The following sequence of commands copies a structure from the source directory to the destination directory:

% cd source_dir; tar cf - . | (cd destination_dir; tar xfBp -)

The "-" is used for the name of the tar file (argument to the f option) so that tar writes to the standard output or reads from the standard input, as appropriate.