need help with tar'ing and bz2'ing a file

surfbass · 06-01-2005, 04:46 PM

i read the man pages and i still cant figure it out...can somebody just got through the standard way to tar a directory and then bz2 (and .gz) it?

Andrew Benton · 06-01-2005, 04:54 PM

I don't know about the standard way, but what I do is cd into the folder above the one I want to compress and then use the command
tar cjf $FOLDER.tar.bz2 $FOLDER
replace $FOLDER with the actual name of the folder

surfbass · 06-01-2005, 04:57 PM

thanks...helped a lot

Boby · 06-01-2005, 04:58 PM

Hello!

Pack a directory to an tar archive:

Code:

tar -cvf archive.tar directory

Pack now the the archive.tar to gz:

Code:

gzip archive.tar

You can merge this two steps and create a tar.gz archive of a directory with:

Code:

tar -cvf archive.tar directory && gzip archive.tar

Or a much faster and simply way:

Code:

tar cvfz archive.tar.gz directory

To pack a directory to a bz2 archive:

Code:

tar -cvjf archive.tar.bz2 directory

Good luck!
Boby

LinuxSeeker · 06-01-2005, 05:07 PM

EDIT: Sorry, I misread your message. If you have read the manual then try to play with simple, small text files to practice the additional options of tar and bzip2.