The history behind tar is in early times, the tar file format was used to create archives to store files on magnetic tape, and hence the full form of tar is Tape ARchive. Recently, most of our files downloaded from the internet have been compressed using a particular compression format, where a few formats are tar, tar.gz, and tar.bz2. Syntax: tar -xvf -wildcards ‘’ How does Untar Command work in Linux? Extract all files from the tar Archive File matching a particular file regex Extract a single file from the tar Archive Fileĩ. List the Content of tar.bz2 Archive FileĨ. Untar tar archive File at the desired locationħ. In Linux, there are fewer options available for untar compared to other extensively used commands, and we will discuss all of those in detail here in this section later in the article, take a dig at the working of untar commands in Linux.Ĥ.