Possible Duplicate:
gzipping up a set of directories and creating a tar compressed file
This post describes how to gzip each file individually within a directory structure. However, I need to do something slightly different. I need to produce one big gzip file for all files under a certain directory. I also need to be able to specify the output filename for the compressed file (e.g., files.gz) and overwrite the old compressed file file if one already exists.
tar -zcvf compressFileName.tar.gz folderToCompress
everything in folderToCompress will go to compressFileName
Edit: After review and comments I realized that people may get confused with compressFileName without an extension. If you want you can use .tar.gz extension(as suggested) with the compressFileName
there are lots of compression methods that work recursively command line and its good to know who the end audience is.
i.e. if it is to be sent to someone running windows then zip would probably be best:
zip -r file.zip folder_to_zip
unzip filenname.zip
for other linux users or your self tar is great
tar -cvzf filename.tar.gz folder
tar -cvjf filename.tar.bz2 folder # even more compression
#change the -c to -x to above to extract
One must be careful with tar and how things are tarred up/extracted, for example if I run
cd ~
tar -cvzf passwd.tar.gz /etc/passwd
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/etc/passwd
pwd
/home/myusername
tar -xvzf passwd.tar.gz
this will create
/home/myusername/etc/passwd
unsure if all versions of tar do this:
Removing leading `/' from member names
@amitchhajer 's post works for GNU tar. If someone finds this post and needs it to work on a NON GNU
system, they can do this:
tar cvf - folderToCompress | gzip > compressFileName
To expand the archive:
zcat compressFileName | tar xvf -