Create a tar.xz in one command
If you like the pipe mode, this is the most clean solution:
tar c some-dir | xz > some-dir.tar.xz
It's not necessary to put the f
option in order to deal with files and then to use -
to specify that the file is the standard input. It's also not necessary to specify the -z
option for xz
, because it's default.
It works with gzip
and bzip2
too:
tar c some-dir | gzip > some-dir.tar.gz
or
tar c some-dir | bzip2 > some-dir.tar.bz2
Decompressing is also quite straightforward:
xzcat tarball.tar.xz | tar x
bzcat tarball.tar.bz2 | tar x
zcat tarball.tar.gz | tar x
If you have only tar
archive, you can use cat
:
cat archive.tar | tar x
If you need to list the files only, use tar t
.
Switch -J
only works on newer systems. The universal command is:
To make .tar.xz archive
tar cf - directory/ | xz -z - > directory.tar.xz
Explanation
tar cf - directory
reads directory/ and starts putting it to TAR format. The output of this operation is generated on the standard output.|
pipes standard output to the input of another program...... which happens to be
xz -z -
. XZ is configured to compress (-z
) the archive from standard input (-
).You redirect the output from
xz
to thetar.xz
file.
Use the -J
compression option for xz
. And remember to man tar
:)
tar cfJ <archive.tar.xz> <files>
Edit 2015-08-10:
If you're passing the arguments to tar
with dashes (ex: tar -cf
as opposed to tar cf
), then the -f
option must come last, since it specifies the filename (thanks to @A-B-B for pointing that out!). In that case, the command looks like:
tar -cJf <archive.tar.xz> <files>