Very easy question.. you will probably laugh

christianunix · 10-09-2007, 03:08 PM

I am trying to compress a file named realmaltese

so I give this command on the command line

Code:

tar cvzf realmaltese

but the above gives me the following message

tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

what can I do? what am I doing wrong?

thanks

AlucardZero · 10-09-2007, 03:12 PM

Code:

tar cvzf realmaltese.tar.gz realmaltese

the 'f' wants a file name, and was grabbing the "realmaltese", then there was nothing to put in the archive.

Nylex · 10-09-2007, 03:18 PM

If you just want to compress a single file, you can just gzip or bzip it (see the man pages for gzip and bzip2, respectively). Edit: oh and please use useful thread titles in future.

Wim Sturkenboom · 10-09-2007, 11:40 PM

The 'f' in cvzf refers to the output filename, not the input filename.

gejr · 10-10-2007, 03:19 AM

In other words:

Code:

tar cvzf output-file.tar.gz input-file

or

Code:

tar cvzf output-file.tar.gz *

to take all files in the directory-tree and put them in output-file.tar.gz

Hope this clarified stuff for you.