tar

create a archive from a directory

Tar creates archives by default from the root / directory. This preserves absolute paths, and if extracted to root, it should fall nicely in place. This is ideal for creating deployment artifacts:

$ tar -czf archive.tgz ./my-dir

If you want to create an archive from a directory, you must pass the -C flag, which changes the directroy from root. Then pass . to specify that the current directory must be archived:

$ tar -czvf archive.tgz -C ./my-dir .

• stackoverflow

extract archive into directory

$ tar -xzf ./archive.tgz -C /target/directory