Create a tar xz in one command

Question

I am trying to create a  tar xz compressed archive in one command  What is the specific syntax for that   I have tried tar cf - file   xz file tar xz  but that does not work

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Quick Solution tarxz     tar cf -  quot  1 quot    xz -4e  gt   quot  1 quot  tar xz     tarxz name of directory   Notice  not name of directory    Using xz compression options If you want to use compression options for xz  or if you are using tar on MacOS  you probably want to avoid the tar -cJf syntax  According to man xz  the way to do this is  tar cf - filename   xz -4e  gt  filename tar xz Because I liked Wojciech Adam Koszek s format  but not information   c creates a new archive for the specified files  f reads from a directory  best to put this second because -cf    -fc  - outputs to Standard Output   pipes output to the next command xz -4e calls xz with the -4e compression option   equal to -4 --extreme   gt  filename tar xz directs the tarred and compressed file to filename tar xz  where -4e is  use your own compression options  I often use -k to --keep the original file and -9 for really heavy compression  -z to manually set xz to zip  though it defaults to zipping if not otherwise directed  To uncompress and untar To echo Rafael van Horn  to uncompress  amp  untar  see note below   xz -dc filename tar xz   tar x   Note  unlike Rafael s answer  use xz -dc instead of catxz  The docs recommend this in case you are using this for scripting  Best to have a habit of using -d or --decompress instead of unxz as well  However  if you must  using those commands from the command line is fine

User · Answer

Switch -J only works on newer systems  The universal command is   To make  tar xz archive  tar cf - directory    xz -z -  gt  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 the tar xz file

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Try this   tar -cf file tar file-to-compress   xz -z file tar  Note    tar gz and tar xz are not the same  xz provides better compression  Don t use pipe    because this runs commands simultaneously  Using   or  amp  executes commands one after another

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If you like the pipe mode  this is the most clean solution   tar c some-dir   xz  gt  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  gt  some-dir tar gz   or  tar c some-dir   bzip2  gt  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

User · Answer

Use the -J compression option for xz  And remember to man tar     tar cfJ  lt archive tar xz gt   lt files gt    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  lt archive tar xz gt   lt files gt

[compression] Create a tar.xz in one command

Quick Solution

Using xz compression options

To uncompress and untar

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