tar (5.11)
Traditionally, tar (short for Tape ARchive) was used for backups to tape drives
It’s also useful to create archive files on disk.
Example: creating an archive of a directory structure:
Example: uncompressing and extracting a tar file:
gunzip < dir2.tar.gz | tar fxvp -
Example: copying a directory structure:
tar fcvp - dir1 | ( cd newloc; tar fxvp - )
Advantage over “cp -rp”: preserves symbolic links