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Notable `tar' Usages
====================

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   You can easily use archive files to transport a group of files from
one system to another: put all relevant files into an archive on one
computer system, transfer the archive to another system, and extract
the contents there.  The basic transfer medium might be magnetic tape,
Internet FTP, or even electronic mail (though you must encode the
archive with `uuencode' in order to transport it properly by mail).
Both machines do not have to use the same operating system, as long as
they both support the `tar' program.

   For example, here is how you might copy a directory's contents from
one disk to another, while preserving the dates, modes, owners and
link-structure of all the files therein.  In this case, the transfer
medium is a "pipe", which is one a Unix redirection mechanism:

     $ cd sourcedir; tar -cf - . | (cd targetdir; tar -xf -)

The command also works using short option forms:

     $ cd sourcedir; tar --create --file=- . | (cd targetdir; tar --extract --file=-)

This is one of the easiest methods to transfer a `tar' archive.