I am trying to archive the contents of my home directory using tar and then compress the tar file with gzip. I know you can uncompress and unarchive the .tar.gz file using cat, tar and gzip. But , I don't know how to compress and archive.
Hey there here is a link for your question. a full guide
https://www.howtogeek.com/248780/how-to-compress-and-extract-files-using-the-tar-command-on-linux/
tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file
Here’s what those switches actually mean:
-c: Create an archive.
-z: Compress the archive with gzip.
-v: Display progress in the terminal while creating the archive, also known as “verbose” mode. The v is always optional in these commands, but it’s helpful.
-f: Allows you to specify the filename of the archive.
Related
TL;DR
How can I untar a file .tgz, and then selectively gzip the output?
My extracted dir has a few text files and a .nii file. I'd like to gzip the later.
More details
First method would be to just do sequentially. However I'm dealing with a huge dataset (10k+ tar archives) stored on a BeeGFS file system and I was told it would be better to do it in memory instead in two steps, since BeeGFS doesn't like handling big directories like this.
Sequential method:
for tarfile in ${rootdir}/*.tgz; do
tarpath="${tarfile%.tgz}"
tar zxvf ${tarfile} # (1) untar directory
gzip ${tarpath}/*.nii # (2) gzip the .nii file
done
Is there a way to combine (1) and (2)? Or do you have any other tips on how to do this process effectively?
Thanks!
You can extract a single file from the archive (If you know the filename), and have tar write it to standard output instead of to a file with -O, and then compress that stream and redirect it to a file. Something like
tar xzOf "$tarfile" "$tarpath/foo.nii" | gzip -c > "$tarpath/foo.nii.gz"
You can then extract everything else in the archive with tar xzf "$tarfile" --exclude "*.nii"
What is the Unix bash command to get the list of files (like ls) from archive file of type .bz2 (without unzipping the archive)?
First bzip2, gzip, etc compress only one file. So probably you have compressed tar file. To list the files you need command like:
tar tjvf file.bz2
This command uncompress the archive and test the content of tar.
Note that bzip2 compresses each file, and a simple .bz2 file always contains a single file of the same name with the ".bz2" part stripped off. When using bzip2 to compress a file, there is no option to specify a different name, the original name is used and .bz2 appended. So there are no files, only 1 file. If that file is a tar archive, it can contain many files, and the whole contents of the .tar.bz2 file can be listed with "tar tf file.tar.bz2" without unpacking the archive.
I have a large tar archive with many xml files in it. a couple of xml files in this archive are corrupt. How can I extract the good files without the program exiting?
There is a tar file within the gz
tar zxf myFile.gz
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: rmtlseek not stopped at a record boundary
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
It looks, from the filename, as though you're trying to unpack something that isn't a tar archive. Usually a tar file would have a .tar extension, and if it had been then compressed with gzip, it would be .tar.gz or .tgz.
The command you're running, with the z option to tar, tries to undo gzip compression first, and then untar the resulting archive. But from the .gz extension, it rather looks as though you've got a gzipped file rather than a gzipped tar archive.
The best thing to do is to examine the file to find out what sort of file it is:
file myFile.gz
That will tell you whether it's gzipped or whatever. If it's gzipped, then run
gunzip myFile.gz
That will leave you with myFile without the extension; you can then use
file myFile
to probe it to determine whether it's a tar archive or something else.
mv myFile.gz myFile.tar.gz
gunzip myfile.tar.gz
tar xf myFile.tar
You might try bzip2recover to try recover the bondaries first!
bzip2recover file.bzip
eg from manual:
In case of damage to one member of a .gz file, other members can still be recovered (if the
file: Corrupt input. Use zcat to recover some data.
usage: zcat file > recover
Is there any possible way to compress a directory with GZip, BZip, BZip2, xz format. I'm building a command line tool(using bash) which I need these options to be included.
A command like
tar czf output.tar.gz yourdir/
should work.
c means that tar will create an archive
z means that the output will be compressed (using gzip)
the output filename is after f
at the end, you can specify any number of directories/files (space-separated)
To answer the "why" part of your question, it is because of the Unix philosophy of having many small tools that do their job well that you can string together, as opposed to one big tool that doesn't do anything well and is hard to make better. Your examples are a perfect illustration of this philosophy, where you have several compression tools to choose from, and it is easy to add a new compression tool to your tool box. The archiving part, turning a directory of files into a byte stream, is a different task that is its own tool that can be combined with any of those or any future compression tools.
The body of your question then asks "how". You use a pipe with tar, cpio, or pax. tar is the most common. You then name the file accordingly so the consumer of the file can tell what it is from the name. E.g. ending with .tar.gz. Like this:
tar cf - somedirectory | gzip > somedirectory.tar.gz
or
tar cf - somedirectory | xz > somedirectory.tar.xz
These tar up the directory into a byte stream, which is then piped to a compressor. The output of the compressor is then written to the file containing the compressed directory contents.
To decompress:
gzip -dc somedirectory.tar.gz | tar xf -
Here it is done in the reverse order to first decompress the file and feed the output of that to tar to extract the files and recreate the directory structure. The - means to put the archive to stdout or get the archive from stdin.
Having said all that stuff about how much better it is to have small tools that do their job well, this application of tar is so incredibly common that it is built into the tar options. So you can instead:
tar czf somedirectory.tar.gz somedirectory
tar cJf somedirectory.tar.xz somedirectory
tar will run the gzip or xz executables and pipe the data through them itself.
(J is a recent gnutar addition, so your tar may not have it.)
I want to compress files from the filesystem to a directory within a new zip archive or update an old one. So here is my example:
directory/
|-file1.ext
|-file2.ext
|-file3.ext
in the zip archive it should look like this:
new_directory/
|-file1.ext
|-file2.ext
|-file3.ext
I could copy the files to a new directory and compress them from there but i do not want to have that extra step. I haven't found an answer to that problem on google. The man page doesn't mention anything like that aswell so I hope somebody can help me.
I don't think the zip utility supports this sort of transformation. A workaround is to use a symbolic link:
ln -s directory new_directory
zip -r foo.zip new_directory
rm new_directory
If other archive formats are an option for you, then this would be a bit easier with a tar archive, since GNU tar has a --transform option taking a sed command that it applies to the file name before adding the file to the archive.
In that case, you could use (for example)
tar czf foo.tar.gz --transform 's:^directory/:new_directory/:' directory