A gzipped tarball is a tar archive compressed using gzip. We can use two methods to create such tarballs:

• The first method is as follows:

        $ tar -czvvf archive.tar.gz [FILES]

Alternatively, this command can be used:

        $ tar -cavvf archive.tar.gz [FILES]

The -z option specifies gzip compression and the -a option specifies that the compression format should be determined from the extension.

• The second method is as follows:

First, create a tarball:

        $ tar -cvvf archive.tar [FILES]

Then, compress the tarball:

        $ gzip archive.tar

If many files (a few hundred) are to be archived in a tarball and need to be compressed, we use the second method with a few changes. The problem with defining many files on the command line is that it can accept only a limited number of files as arguments. To solve this problem, we create a tar file by adding files one by one in a loop with the append option (-r), as follows:

FILE_LIST="file1  file2 file3  file4  file5" 
for f in $FILE_LIST;
  do
  tar -rvf archive.tar $f
done
gzip archive.tar

The following command will extract a gzipped tarball:

    $ tar -xavvf archive.tar.gz -C extract_directory

In the preceding command, the -a option is used to detect the compression format.