xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). In this case if you have a file called '12" record'. Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem. Both solutions work bad if the number of files is more than the allowed line length of the shell.

tar command options: -z : Uncompress the resulting archive with gzip command. -x : Extract to disk from the archive. -v : Produce verbose output i.e. show progress and file names while extracting files. -f backup.tgz : Read the archive from the specified file called backup.tgz. -C /tmp/data : Unpack/extract files in /tmp/data instead of the default current directory.

Very simple and useful, you need to change the word "directory" for your directory

Doesn't create a file Make sure to list the files / directories in the same order every time.

Where foodir is the directory you want to zip up.

the f is for file and - stdout, This way little shorter. I Like copy-directory function It does the job but looks like SH**, and this doesn't understand folders with whitespaces and can only handle full path, but otherwise fine, function copy-directory () { ; FrDir="$(echo $1 | sed 's:/: :g' | awk '/ / {print $NF}')" ; SiZe="$(du -sb $1 | awk '{print $1}')" ; (cd $1 ; cd .. ; tar c $FrDir/ )|pv -s $SiZe|(cd $2 ; tar x ) ; } Show Sample Output