How to compress the directory and its contents

Question

How do I compress a directory and its contents in ksh on AIX

for a file I do compress filename

Possible duplicate of Compress a folder with tar? – May 15 '18 at 01:06 — , May 15 '18 at 01:06

Sepahrad Salour · Answer 1 · 2015-02-21T03:36:47.150

5

tar cjf <your-name-in-specific-path> <your-directory-path>

c: Create              
j: Use bzip2 for compression            
f: Save it to given file name

NOTE: If your tar version doesn't have these options you can follow the below instruction:

tar cf <your-name-in-specific-path> <your-directory-path>
gzip <your-name-in-specific-path>

NOTE: You can compress your file with other tools like bzip2, xz and so on.

edited Feb 21 '15 at 03:36

answered Feb 20 '15 at 14:35

Sepahrad Salour

2,649

once you have tar and compressed the directory, you'll have to delete it in order to reclaim space, this might not be what you wanted. – Archemar Feb 20 '15 at 14:36
@Mat, Thanks for your notice... I edited my post. – Sepahrad Salour Feb 20 '15 at 16:49
AIX doesn't come with bzip2 by default either. – EightBitTony Feb 20 '15 at 20:00

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 20 '15 at 14:33

A directory cannot be compressed, because a directory is not a plain file. It is a pointer to a container of a set of files.

You can tar a directory and its contents into a single file and compress that file. Or you can cd into the directory and compress each individual file.

Pacifist · Answer 3 · 2019-09-10T06:20:12.950

Tar in AIX by default does not support compression. You will need to incorporate with gzip command to have it tar and compress at the same time.

$ tar cvf test.tar test                      # pure tar only
$ tar cvf - test | gzip > test.tar.gz        # tar and compress together

To uncompress and untar as well :

$ gunzip -c test.tar.gz | tar tvf -           # list compress files
$ gunzip -c test.tar.gz | tar xvf -           # decompress files

How to compress the directory and its contents

3 Answers3