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I'm trying to compress a folder (/var/www/) to ~/www_backups/$time.tar where $time is the current date.

This is what I have:

cd /var/www && sudo tar -czf ~/www_backups $time"

I am completely lost and I've been at this for hours now. Not sure if -czf is correct. I simply want to copy all of the content in /var/www into a $time.tar file, and I want to maintain the file permissions for all of the files. Can anyone help me out?

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2 Answers

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To tar and gzip a folder, the syntax is:

tar czf name_of_archive_file.tar.gz name_of_directory_to_tar

The - is optional. If you want to tar the current directory, use . to designate that.

To construct your filename, use the date utility (look at its man page for the available format options). For example:

cd /var/www && sudo tar czf ~/www_backups/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).tar.gz .

This would have created a file named something like 20120902-185558.tar.gz.

On Linux, chances are your tar also supports BZip2 compression with the j rather than z option. And possibly others. Check the man page on your local system.

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This is perfect, thank you. I have one tiny issue though. After creating a tar file of /var/www, it is placed within /var/www directories in the tar file. Here's the code i'm using now sudo tar -czf ~/www_backups/$time.tar /var/www/" Imagine i have a file called test.txt inside /var/www. After making a tar copy of the file, when i extract it it will be placed inside /var/www directories. Does that make sense? I hope it does, kinda hard to explain. I will check for BZip2 support, thanks for the suggestion! – qwerty Sep 2 '12 at 17:27
That's why you first cd to the directory you want to package, then tar cf file.tar . - that last . instead of specifying the full path will make the paths inside the archive relative to the current directory. You could also use the -C option for tar (look at the man page). – Mat Sep 2 '12 at 17:29
Yup, that worked much better. Thanks a bunch, appreciate it! – qwerty Sep 2 '12 at 17:33
up vote -2 down vote

To compress a folder with tar, the answer is:

~]# mkdir /office
~]# ll
~]# tar -cvf office.tar office
~]#

That is it.

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What is that “ll”? – manatwork May 13 at 12:20
that does not compress anything. This just puts things together in a (non-compressed) tar file. – Anthon May 13 at 12:35
@manatwork ll is probably an alias for ls -l I have used systems where that alias was provided by default (Irix IIRC). – Anthon May 13 at 12:37
@Anthon, that was my guess too. But then how that will help a tar running in ~ (at least according to the prompt) to find the office directory created in the root? – manatwork May 13 at 12:45

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