How do you add files to a .bz2 archived file?

okos · 11-23-2008, 12:02 AM

Hi
Actually I have two questions:
1. How do I add files to a .bz2 archived file?

2. How do I archive several different files or directories into one .bz2 file.

billymayday · 11-23-2008, 12:22 AM

IIRC, you can't ( ie -r won't work with compression). You can specify multiple directories/files on the command line though, so

tar cjf outfile.tar.bz2 /home/user1 /home/user2

If you really want to add files, you would need to untar, add files, retar.

i92guboj · 11-23-2008, 08:54 AM

bzip2 and gzip can only compress single files.

If you want to compress many files you first need to join them using another tool. Usually tar is used for that, since it has support for bzip2 (-j) and gzip (-z) integrated. But any other tool that's capable of joining files (and split them when required) will work as well.

okos · 11-23-2008, 01:06 PM

There is the -A --concatenate attribute for the tar command but I am not sure exactly what is it for and how to use it. I thought this command was to add additional files.

billymayday · 11-23-2008, 01:26 PM

I think that's i the same category as -r. Do some searching online, but I'm pretty sure I hit the same wall a long time ago.

colucix · 11-23-2008, 03:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by okos

There is the -A --concatenate attribute for the tar command but I am not sure exactly what is it for and how to use it. I thought this command was to add additional files.

The GNU tar manual explains it all. --concatenate is meant to join two archives, whereas --append is to add individual files to an existing archive.

billymayday · 11-23-2008, 03:51 PM

Good link colucix.

The restriction I was referring to is here http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html#SEC127

Quote:

Notice also, that there are several restrictions on operations on compressed archives. First of all, compressed archives cannot be modified, i.e., you cannot update (‘--update’ (‘-u’)) them or delete (‘--delete’) members from them or add (‘--append’ (‘-r’)) members to them. Likewise, you cannot append another tar archive to a compressed archive using ‘--concatenate’ (‘-A’)). Secondly, multi-volume archives cannot be compressed.

okos · 11-24-2008, 06:55 PM

Thanks guys
I copied the desired files into a separate directory
tarred it to a bz2 file and then deleted the separate directory

I guess that is the long way around :-[