Preface

This manual describes the GNU tape archiver, tar, and how you can use it to store copies of a file or a group of files in an archive. This archive may be written directly to a magnetic tape or other storage medium, stored as a file, or sent through a pipe to another program. tar can also be used to add files to an already existing archive, list the files in an archive, or extract the files in the archive.

GNU tar was written by John Gilmore, and modified by many people. The GNU enhancements were written by Jay Fenlason.

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