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Accepted
Wolfy
Asked: 2012-11-09 00:38:32 +0800 CST

Directly compress stdout

  • 772

can someone tell me if is possible to directly compress stdout?

I would like to do this in one step without creating temporary file files.txt...

Example:

cat file* > files.txt
tar -czf files.tar files.txt
rm files.txt

Is this possible?

command-line

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can bypass the tar part of .tar.gz in this case, since you don't need to handle multiple files, and skip straight to gzip for compression.

    To compress

    gzip < file > file.gz

    To decompress

    gzip -d file.gz

    or equivalently 

    gunzip file.gz

    You can also use the bzip2 and xz compression utilities with similar syntax. xz usually produces smaller compressed files than either gzip or bzip2.

    (Footnote)

    If you are creating a compressed file and then using scp to transfer it, you can use built-in compression:

    cat file | ssh -C user@remote 'cat >> remote_file'

    or

    scp -C file user@remote:/path/on/remote

    or

    rsync -avz file user@remote:/path/on/remote
    • 5

  2. Leave the f option off.

    Something I've done is like this:

    tar -cz *.xml

    This prints to stdout. I could then use some code to ssh into the server tar/gzip them all up and save locally without needing to create a new file on the server.

    • 0