File Name arguments specify which files in the file system
tar
operates on, when creating or adding to an archive, or which
archive members tar
operates on, when reading or deleting from
an archive. See section The Five Advanced tar
Operations.
To specify file names, you can include them as the last arguments on the command line, as follows:
tar operation [option1 option2 ...] [file name-1 file name-2 ...]
If you specify a directory name as a file name argument, all the files
in that directory are operated on by tar
.
If you do not specify files when tar
is invoked with
--create (-c), tar
operates on all the non-directory files in
the working directory. If you specify either --list (-t) or
--extract (--get, -x), tar
operates on all the archive members in the
archive. If you specify any operation other than one of these three,
tar
does nothing.
By default, tar
takes file names from the command line. However,
there are other ways to specify file or member names, or to modify the
manner in which tar
selects the files or members upon which to
operate; @FIXME{add xref here}. In general, these methods work both for
specifying the names of files and archive members.
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