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aardbol
Asked: 2010-05-15 10:05:30 +0800 CST

Single line command/script to archive a certain amount of folders

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I'm looking for a single line command or a script that archives 5 folders into .tar files (no gzip/bzip needed) in a certain directory and deletes the folders after a successful compression. It has to use the original folder name as file name for the archive too.

So far I've used the current command, which only does one directory per time:

tar -c directory > directory.tar && rm -rf directory

Thanks in advance.

linux compression

3 Answers

  1. it's a bit lengthy but:

    for i in dir1 dir2 dir3; do tar -cf $i.tar $i; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then rm -rf $i; fi; done

    edit; tar -cf dir.tar dir is a little more concise than tar -c dir > dir.tar

    example script:

    #!/bin/sh
DIR=$1
tar -cf $DIR.tar $DIR/
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  rm -rf $DIR
fi

    you can plop that into script.sh, chmod 755 script.sh and then run it like script.sh directory

    however, you could add a lot more to it, to get a list of directories from your main directory, and even use a file to keep track of the last time directory was archived, so you can set your maximum, etc.

    • 1
  2. Best Answer

    This will process the first five directories under the directory passed as an argument to the script.

    #!/bin/bash
c=1
for directory in $1/*
do
    if [[ -d "$directory" ]]
    then
        tar -cf "${directory}.tar" "$directory" && rm -rf "$directory"
        if (( c++ > 5 ))
        then
            break
        fi
    fi
done

    I'm curious about the reason for the limit.

    • 1 
  3. for dir in dir1 dir2 dir3 dir4 dir5 ; do tar -c "$dir" > "$dir".tar && rm -rf "$dir" ; done
    • 0