I am rather new to these operating systems, and today I ran a tar -c command, specifically tar -c file.tar.gz folder/ which resulted in me panicking and ctrl-c my way out of that. But I've noticed there's a generic file named v with no extensions in the folder containing the one i was trying to put in a tar. I was wondering, what exactly did that command do and what is that file? I'm perplexed as v is nowhere near the name of the .tar.gz file i was trying to create. For reference, the machine i was working on is a CentOs 6.7
tar - c and generic v file
shell;tar
If you just do tar -c  file.tar.gz folder/the parameters tell tar to create a tar file (-c) from the files file.tar.gz and those files under folder/. Since you don't specify where the output has to go (with -f or by redirection on the commandline) no files will be created, but your screen might be garbled.What you probably wanted to do is write a tar file called file.tar.gz for that you need to both specify to tar to write to a file (-f), and specify to apply compression (-z). Combined:tar -czf file.tar.gz folder/