One of the basic operations of tar is --create (-c), which
you use to create a tar archive. We will explain
--create first because, in order to learn about the other
operations, you will find it useful to have an archive available to
practice on.
To make this easier, in this section you will first create a directory
containing three files. Then, we will show you how to create an
archive (inside the new directory). Both the directory, and
the archive are specifically for you to practice on. The rest of this
chapter and the next chapter will show many examples using this
directory and the files you will create: some of those files may be
other directories and other archives.
The three files you will archive in this example are called
blues, folk, and jazz. The archive is called
collection.tar.
This section will proceed slowly, detailing how to use --create
in verbose mode, and showing examples using both short and long
forms. In the rest of the tutorial, and in the examples in the next
chapter, we will proceed at a slightly quicker pace. This section
moves more slowly to allow beginning users to understand how
tar works.
