Avoids creating useless directory entries in archive, and sorts files by (roughly) extension, which is likely to group similar files together for better compression. 1%-5% improvement.

Use `tar xj` for bzip2 archives.

What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish.

Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space.

Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting.

This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

Tar - Compress by excluding folders

Create a tar file in multiple parts if it's to large for a single disk, your filesystem, etc.

Rejoin later with `cat .tar.*|tar xf -`

The magic is performed by the parameter -t

This script will list all the files in the tarballs present on any folder or subfolder of the provided path. The while loop is for echoing the file name of the tarball before listing the files, so the tarball can be identified

This command will copy a folder tree (keeping the parent folders) through ssh. It will:

- compress the data

- stream the compressed data through ssh

- decompress the data on the local folder

This command will take no additional space on the host machine (no need to create compressed tar files, transfer it and then delete it on the host).

There is some situations (like mirroring a remote machine) where you simply cant wait for a huge time taking scp command or cant compress the data to a tarball on the host because of file system space limitation, so this command can do the job quite well.

This command performs very well mainly when a lot of data is involved in the process. If you copying a low amount of data, use scp instead (easier to type)

The command as given would create the file "/result_path/result.tar.gz" with the contents of the target folder including permissions and sub- folder structure.

Using tape archive create a tar file in Stdout (-) and pipe that into a compound command to extract the tar file from Stdin at the destination. This similar to "Copy via tar pipe ...", but copies across file systems boundaries. I prefer to use cp -pr for copying within the same file system.

I find the ouput of ls -lR to be un-satisfying (why is the path data up there?) and find syntax to be awkward. Running 'du -a' means you will have likely to trim-off filesize data before feeding filenames to the next step in the pipe.

This command creates tar zip of a directory and its sub-directories.

creates a compressed tar archive of files in /path/foo and writes to a timestamped filename in /path.

Use tar command for a backup info with a date of creation

Useful to move many files (thousands or millions files) over ssh. Faster than scp because this way you save a lot of tcp connection establishments (syn/ack packets).

If using a fast lan (I have just tested gigabyte ethernet) it is faster to not compress the data so the command would be:

tar -cf - /home/user/test | ssh user@sshServer 'cd /tmp; tar xf -'

and you quickly know the files you changed

It's the same like 'cp -p' if available. It's faster over networks than scp. If you have to copy gigs of data you could also use netcat and the tar -z option in conjunction -- on the receiving end do:

# nc -l 7000 | tar -xzvpf -

...and on the sending end do:

# tar -czf - * | nc otherhost 7000

If you want certain files out of a directory hierarchy, this will copy just the listed files, but will create the directory hierarchy in the new location ($DIR/)

Just a copy of a big dir when you wan't things like ownership and date etc etc to be untouched.

Note: Updated with the ideas from "mpb".

Just copy and paste the code in your terminal.

Note : sudo apt-get for debian versions , change as per your requirement .

Source : www.h3manth.com

command to decrypt:

Of course, don't forget to rm the original files ;) You may also want to look at the openssl docs for more options.

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 ) ; }