gzipping up a set of directories and creating a tar compressed file

Question

My bash fu is not what it should be.

I want to create a little batch script which will copy a list of directories into a new zip file.

There are (at least) t

Answer 1

You can export a variable like DIRECTORIES="DIR1 DIR2 DIR3 ...." And in the script you need to use the variable like tar czvf $DIRECTORIES

Answer 2

You can create a gzipped tar on the commandline as follows:

tar czvf mytar.tar.gz dir1 dir2 .. dirN

If you wanted to do that in a bash script and pass the directories as arguments to the script, those arguments would end up in $@. So then you have:

tar czvf mytar.tar.gz "$@"

If that is in a script (lets say myscript.sh), you would call that as:

./myscript.sh dir1 dir2 .. dirN

If you want to read from a list (your option 1) you could do that like so (this does not work if there is whitespace in directory names):

tar czvf mytar.tar.gz $(<config.txt)

Answer 3

In case, you are looking for compressing a directory, the following command can help.

pbzip2 compresses directories using parallel implementation

tar cf <outputfile_name> --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 <directory_name>

Answer 4

Just use the null-byte as delimiter when you write file / directory names to file. This way you need not worry about spaces, newlines, etc. in file names!

printf "%s\000" */ > listOfDirs.txt    # alternative: find ... -print0 

while IFS="" read -r -d '' dir; do command ls -1abd "$dir"; done < listOfDirs.txt

tar --null -czvf mytar.tar.gz --files-from listOfDirs.txt 

Answer 5

create two files: filelist - place all required directories ( one on single line )

and create a simple bash script:

    #!/bin/bash


for DIR in `cat filelist` 
do 
    if [ -d $DIR ] 
    then
        echo $DIR
    fi
done