DZone Snippets: tar code

unix, pack folder and contents with tar gz

assbach (assbach) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:28:02 GMT



tar -zcvf packagename.tar.gz folder/

Avoiding tar's (or any other commandline's) argument list too long error

AhmedT (Ahmed Talaat) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:17:34 GMT

When you try to tar a large number of files (cp, mv, or anything else) you may hit the limit of ARG_MAX. You can overcome this by generating a list of files then feeding it to tar as follows:



# generate the file list

find -iname '*.ext' > fileList.txt



#run tar passing it the file list

tar czvf archive.tar.gz --files-from fileList.txt



# a shorthand of this would be:

find . -name '*.ext' -print | tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz --files-from -

UNIX tar Commands

offspinner () — Wed, 03 May 2006 20:37:24 GMT

// how the heck do you do the stuff you do with zip but with tar



create tar file

tar cvf filename.tar monkey.txt monkey2.txt



add a file

tar uvf filename.tar monkey.txt



extract tar file

tar xvf filename.tar



list contents

tar tf monkey.tar

ssh remote backups

mctt (mctt) — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:57:00 GMT

// http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/12/1937210
// Backup with remote compression and storage

// When compression is necessary (and feasible), workload
// distribution becomes more effective with OpenSSH. Just as // distcc allows multiple machines to compile
// simultaneously, OpenSSH lets one system create the
// archive, while another system compresses it:

// tar cf - dirname | ssh remotehost "gzip -c >
// ${TMPFILE}.tar.gz"



tar cf - local-dir-eliotwalker | ssh -l mctt remote-glos.corruptive.co.uk "gzip -c > corr.tar.gz"