You call tarfile.open with mode='w:gz'
, meaning "Open for gzip compressed writing."
You'll probably want to end the filename (the name
argument to open
) with .tar.gz
, but that doesn't affect compression abilities.
BTW, you usually get better compression with a mode of 'w:bz2'
, just like tar
can usually compress even better with bzip2
than it can compress with gzip
.