GZip on Linux to archive files specified in the te

Question

I have a text file with paths to the list of files I want to compress into a singe archive. How can I pass this file to GZIP so it can create that archive with all files specified in the list?

Milan

Answer 1

gzip only compresses a single file. Use:

tar czf target.tar.gz `cat listoffile`

Answer 2

Well, in the first place, gzip doesn't compress multiple files into a single one, so you'll first tar. At least the GNU tar I checked has the option

  -T, --files-from F
          get names to extract or create from file F

so I suppose tar cfzvT target.tar.gz sourcelist would work.

Answer 3

gzip can only handle a single file at a time. You'll need to archive the files using tar first. Tar can do the compression at the same time (using the "z" argument).

tar cfz archive.tar.gz `cat file`