How to use Pigz with Tar

Question

So I am using pigz in tar with

tar --use-compress-program=pigz

and this works but it doesn\'t use all of my processors, and I\'d like to make s

Answer 1

fast unpack:

tar -I pigz -xf /mnt/sd/current/backup/bigbackup_web.tar.gz -C /tmp

fast pack:

tar -cf bigbackup.tar.gz -I pigz /opt

then:

apt-get install pigz

or

yum install pigz

Answer 2

Mark Adler's top voted answer on the SO link that you included in your question does provide a solution for specifying compression-level as well as number of processors to use:

tar cf - paths-to-archive | pigz -9 -p 32 > archive.tar.gz

See : https://stackoverflow.com/a/12320421

Answer 3

To pass arguments to pigz using -I or --use-compress-program, you can enclose the command and arguments in quotes, like so:

tar --use-compress-program="pigz --best --recursive" -cf archive.tar.gz YourData

Here's a fun option to monitor the speed of the archive creation:

tar --use-compress-program="pigz --best --recursive | pv" -cf archive.tar.gz YourData