Make tar gz file

This can clutter up a directory quickly! It is an archive file with several other files inside it, which is then compressed. To instruct tar to put the extracted unzipped files into a specific directory, enter:. The addition of the —z option is what signals tar to compress the files. This copies the contents of your Documents folder into a single file, called documents. The options -cvf work as follows:. This command extracts and lists all files from the documents.

The -x option tells tar to extract the files. You can also use xargs with tar to create a tar. Note: Some graphical interfaces include a tool for managing tar. Simply right-click the item you want to compress, mouseover compress, and choose tar. You can also right-click a tar. This tutorial explains how to use the tar tool, the gzip tool, and how to utilize them together to work with tar. Best External Solid State Drives. Best Portable Chargers. Best Phone Chargers.

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Windows 11 Uninstall Clock. Teams Walkie-Talkie. PCI Express 6. Wordle Scams. T-Mobile iCloud Private Relay. Avira Antivirus Crypto Miner. Linux PinePhone Pro. Google Green Messages. So the solution would be to tar gzip the files into one huge file and then copy that file.

Trouble was, there was not enough free disk space to handle the huge file. Netcat to the rescue! Netcat is a very powerful tool it can open a raw network port and pass data through that port and it can listen for a raw data stream on the other end. So the trick is to tar gzip the files and pipe the output no filename into nc directing nc to a network port number of choice. To give you an idea of how effective something like that is; the attempted copy operation over an SMB share ran for 5 hours and the Finder was still just calculating the number of files which at that point was well over , files!

I tried using the cp command from terminal and it was only about a third of the way through the copy process having run overnight. The performance graph rapidly peaked and stayed completely peaked the entire time the copy process ran. So essentially, the sending system executed tar and gzip operations storing the data in RAM while it pushed that data over netcat to a waiting netcat listening on a pre-determined network port where the files were pushed to a tar gzip command that decompressed the files.

Since there was a large continuous amount of data pumping through the network port, the amount of bandwidth increased exponentially until it maxed out the Ethernet card. This allowed it to go as fast as it possibly could have run. The mind blowing part? These tools are built in to OS X and every Unix system but they have been around for more than 20 years. The whole Unix concept is small tools that do one thing very well and you connect the tools to one another via the pipe command.

The funny part? The command parameters vary a bit between the two netcat programs and I was unable to get the built-in OS X version of netcat to play nice with the Linux GNU version. Homebrew will not mess up your Mac, but it might confuse someone else trying to work on your Mac. Name required. Mail will not be published required. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without explicit permission is prohibited. Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to our newsletter!

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