And that's about it for this tutorial. Over the last few pages, I took you on a whirlwind tour of the Archive_Tar class, one of the more useful items in PEAR's collection of filesystem tools. I showed you the basics of creating a TAR file, adding files to it, viewing its contents, and extracting it to a specific directory.

I also showed you a couple of more advanced tricks, including compressing the archive with either GZIP or BZIP2 compression and using built-in class methods to alter the directory structure of the files within the archive. Finally, I wrapped things up with two examples of how the Archive_Tar class could be used in real Web applications, by building a simple TAR file viewer and a file backup utility.

In case you'd like to read more about the topics discussed in this article, you should consider bookmarking the following sites:

The official Archive_Tar Web page, at http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?pacid=24

The PEAR Web site, at http://pear.php.net/

The GNU TAR pages, at http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/tar.html

The GZIP pages, at http://www.gzip.org/

The BZIP2 pages, at http://www.digistar.com/bzip2/

Until next time...happy archiving!

Note: Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!