Comments on: Tar and compress a file in one step

By: Vinayak Kamath

Vinayak Kamath — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:21:43 +0000

You can use gtar instead

gtar -cvzf target output.tgz

By: fusiondog

fusiondog — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:20:09 +0000

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

By: Kraken

Kraken — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:36:56 +0000

Instead one can also use

tar -zcvf /home/abc/mydata.tgz /usr/somefolder

By: Quinn McHenry

Quinn McHenry — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:11:34 +0000

it would be:

tar -cf – /home/eaips/var/fileName | gzip -c > /home/eaips/var/fileName.tar.gz

By: Satish

Satish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:40:21 +0000

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

By: Hseb72

Hseb72 — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 09:21:21 +0000

If you wanna try something a little bit funnier, tar and zip a file, then unzip and untar it in another directory in only one step (this is usefull to keep symlinks unchanged)

tar -cvf – mySelection | gzip -c | (cd myNewDirectory ; gzip -dc | tar xvf -)

make this match to your own needs…

By: bofh468

bofh468 — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 21:02:20 +0000

Although this probably belongs under the OpenSSH section, this is a really neat trick for snapping a tarball of a machine with limited diskspace, and storing the output on your workstation (or machine that your SSH’ing from).

You must already have the hostkey from the remote machine (i.e., logged in at least once) otherwise this will fail. SSH allows you to connect to a remote machine and pass a commandline rather than firing up an interactive shell. The output is then dumped to your local console for further processing.

Before you scratch your head, think of this. You have a machine that has virtually no space left (or at least, not enough to make that tarball). qmchenry’s post shows you how to get tar to spool the archive to stdout:

tar -cf - target

What if you can capture that to your own workstation, which probably has ample space. Picture this:

ssh user@remotemachine "cd /path;tar -cf - target | gzip -c" > /path/target.tgz

You’ve just had the remote machine produce a tarball, run it through gzip, and dump the results to stdout. You just captured that at your own workstation, and saved the results.