cli-tarHow do I remove a file from a Unix tar archive?

To remove a file from a Unix tar archive, you can use the tar --delete command. The syntax for this command is tar --delete <archive> <filename>. For example, to delete the file file.txt from the archive archive.tar, you would use:

tar --delete archive.tar file.txt

The command will delete the file from the archive and print a message like the following:

tar: Deleting file `file.txt' from archive `archive.tar'

The parts of the command are as follows:

• tar: The command to use for manipulating tar archives
• --delete: The flag to indicate that you want to delete a file from the archive
• archive.tar: The name of the tar archive
• file.txt: The name of the file to delete from the archive

For more information on the tar --delete command, see the manual page here.

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