This chapter is paced to allow beginners to learn about tar slowly. At the same time, we will try to cover all the basic aspects of these three operations. In order to accomplish both of these tasks, we have made certain assumptions about your knowledge before reading this manual, and the hardware you will be using:

• Before you start to work through this tutorial, you should understand what the terms "archive" and "archive member" mean (see section Some Definitions). In addition, you should understand something about how Unix-type operating systems work, and you should know how to use some basic utilities. For example, you should know how to create, list, copy, rename, edit, and delete files and directories; how to change between directories; and how to figure out where you are in the filesystem. You should have some basic understanding of directory structure and how files are named according to which directory they are in. You should understand concepts such as standard output and standard input, what various definitions of the term "argument" mean, the differences between relative and absolute path names, and @FIXME{what else?}.
• This manual assumes that you are working from your own home directory (unless we state otherwise). In this tutorial, you will create a directory to practice tar commands in. When we show path names, we will assume that those paths are relative to your home directory. For example, my home directory path is `/home/fsf/melissa'. All of my examples are in a subdirectory of the directory named by that path name; the subdirectory is called `practice'.
• In general, we show examples of archives which exist on (or can be written to, or worked with from) a directory on a hard disk. In most cases, you could write those archives to, or work with them on any other device, such as a tape drive. However, some of the later examples in the tutorial and next chapter will not work on tape drives. Additionally, working with tapes is much more complicated than working with hard disks. For these reasons, the tutorial does not cover working with tape drives. See section Tapes and Other Archive Media for complete information on using tar archives with tape drives. @FIXME{this is a cop out. need to add some simple tape drive info.}

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