Tar and compress a file in one step
Contributed by qmchenry 
Tagged: UNIX Creating a compressed archive in UNIX in a single step is faster and is often the only method when disk space is limited.
To archive and compress a directory called ‘target’ in the current working directory into a file called target.tgz use:
tar cf - target | gzip -c > target.tgz
The – in the place of a tar output filename directs tar to send its output to the standard output which is redirected to gzip. Substituting bzip2, when available in your operating system, will also work and generally provides better compression ratios.
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Satish said on March 11, 2009
I have following two steps in my script, how club them and do it in a single step ?
tar -cf /home/eaips/var/fileName.tar /home/eaips/var/fileName
gzip /home/eaips/var/fileName.tar
Quinn McHenry said on March 11, 2009
it would be:
tar -cf – /home/eaips/var/fileName | gzip -c > /home/eaips/var/fileName.tar.gz
Anonymous said on August 17, 2009
Or ‘tar zcf target.tgz’ Most tar versions have had built in gzip function for over a decade at least. Over ssh it would be ssh blah@blah ‘tar zcf -’ > target.tgz
Vinayak Kamath said on November 4, 2009
You can use gtar instead
gtar -cvzf target output.tgz
GlobalNerds said on February 14, 2010
How do you uncompress this in one step?
Anonymous said on April 29, 2010
To Compress !
tar cjf /dir1 file1 /dir2 …. /dirN /fileN => For Bunzip
tar czf /dir1 file1 /dir2 …. /dirN /fileN => For Gunzip
You can always use
“man tar” when you need help !
To Extract/uncompress , replace the “c” with “x” in the above commands !
Thanks ,
Danny