How to make an archive without using diskspace urgent
 

is there a way that i can show a directory as one single file to download. The problem is that i only have a web access plus telnet access toa server. Now there are some 20 directories with each 4Gb in size. I Have linked the apache to the directory but it is very time consuming to download each file one by one. Ofcouse the other approach is to tar them and then download at once but here comes the problem the hard disk is nearly full so i cant create a tar. please answer quickly...as i am short of time

I don't think you're going to be able to do this, sorry to say. Archives take up space by nature, and while you can gzip a single file and have it take the original file's place, you cannot do this for directories or multiple files.

If you could download one of the 4gb directories, then delete it you may have room to tarball the others?

Not quite sure what you mean, but wget allows you to do recursive downloads after you specify the root folder - http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/man...l-Options.html

whilst really hating the use of "urgent" in the title here (i'm in no rush i can assure you... :)) i'd suggest trying to tar to a named pipe and sucking that over apache. I've not tried this at all, and technially a wget -r is simpler, but this is what you actually asked... so try "mkfifo /var/www/html/backuppipe-dir1" then a "tar -cvjf /var/data/dir1 /var/www/html/backuppipe-dir1" then just download that file (via wget) and with a bit of luck that'll work. again i've just thought that up now, do not know if it would work...