cli-tarHow do I compress a directory using gzip and tar?

Using gzip and tar together is a convenient way to compress a directory. The following example code will compress a directory called "mydir" into a single gzipped tarball file called "mydir.tar.gz":

tar -zcvf mydir.tar.gz mydir

The flags used in the command are as follows:

• -z: Compress the tarball with gzip
• -c: Create a new tarball
• -v: Verbosely show the progress
• -f: Specify the filename of the tarball

The output of the command should look something like this:

$ tar -zcvf mydir.tar.gz mydir
mydir/
mydir/file1.txt
mydir/file2.txt
mydir/subdir1/
mydir/subdir1/file3.txt
mydir/subdir2/
mydir/subdir2/file4.txt

For more information, see the GNU tar manual.

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