How do I Compress a Whole Linux or UNIX Directory?

To tar and gzip a folder, the syntax is:

tar czf name_of_archive_file.tar.gz name_of_directory_to_tar

The - is optional. If you want to tar the current directory, use . to designate that.

To construct your filename, use the date utility (look at its man page for the available format options). For example:

cd /var/www && sudo tar czf ~/www_backups/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).tar.gz .

This would have created a file named something like 20120902-185558.tar.gz.

On Linux, chances are your tar also supports BZip2 compression with the j rather than zoption. And possibly others. Check the man page on your local system.

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How can I compress a whole directory under a Linux / UNIX using a shell prompt?

It is very easy to compress a Whole Linux/UNIX directory. It is useful to backup files, email all files, or even to send software you have created to friends. Technically, it is called as a compressed archive. GNU tar command is best for this work. It can be use on remote Linux or UNIX server. It does two things for you:

=> Create the archive

=> Compress the archive

You need to use the tar command as follows (syntax of tar command):
tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name
Where,

• -z : Compress archive using gzip program
• -c: Create archive
• -v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
• -f: Archive File name

For example, say you have a directory called /home/jerry/prog and you would like to compress this directory then you can type tar command as follows:
$ tar -zcvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz /home/jerry/prog
Above command will create an archive file called prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz in current directory. If you wish to restore your archive then you need to use the following command (it will extract all files in current directory):
$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz
Where,

• -x: Extract files

If you wish to extract files in particular directory, for example in /tmp then you need to use the following command:
$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz -C /tmp
$ cd /tmp
$ ls -

A note about non gnu/tar command

The above syntax use GNU tar command for compressing and uncompressing tar files. If your system does not use GNU tar, you can still create a compressed tar file, via the following syntax:
tar -cvf - file1 file2 dir3 | gzip > archive.tar.gz

See also: