How to manually compress a directory with tar

Introduction

This article will walk you through manually compressing a directory with tar on the command line.

Procedure

You will first need to know the path to the directory you wish to compress, in the following command, this will be represented by '/path/to/directory'. Once you have that information, the following can be used to compresses the directory:

tar -zcvf directory.tar.gz /path/to/directory

This will create a copy of the directory in a compressed format in your current working directory.