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I read that tar -A means: add archives to the end of an existing archive; tar -r means: append files to the end of a tar archive. Do they not mean the same thing? Could anyone please explain the difference between these two?

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  • There is no option names -A with tar. You seem to be talking about a vendor specific option from gtar. – schily Sep 12 '18 at 22:20
  • GNU tar is a fairly reasonable assumption, given the Linux tag. – Jeff Schaller♦ Sep 13 '18 at 1:19
  • It would help a lot if people did write gtar when they refer to incompatible gtar enhancements. There are still UNIX platforms around that will not accept gtar options and this is primarily a UNIX portal. – schily Nov 21 '19 at 13:17
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tar -A takes two or more tarballs and concatenates them:

tar -A -f tarball1.tar tarball2.tar

adds the contents of tarball2.tar to tarball1.tar.

tar -r adds files to a tarball:

tar -r -f tarball1.tar file1

adds file1 to tarball1.tar, as a file inside it alongside its other contents.

Here’s a more detailed example:

$ touch file1 file2 file3
$ tar cf tar1.tar file1 file2
$ tar cf tar2.tar file3
$ cp tar1.tar tar3.tar
$ tar Af tar1.tar tar2.tar
$ tar tf tar1.tar
file1
file2
file3
$ tar rf tar3.tar file3
$ tar tf tar3.tar
file1
file2
file3

Note how we end up with the same contents in two different ways. If you used tar -r with multiple tarballs, you’d end up with the added tarballs inside the receiving tarball, as-is, not “unwrapped”.

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