Re: [Bug-tar] tar and gzip

[Phillip Susi]

address@hidden wrote:
> Here is the syntax i am using :
> cd (my directory) ; tar -cvf file.tar *.csv | gzip --best > file.tar.gz;
> uuencode file.tar.gz file.tar.gz | mailx -s Subject
> address@hidden
>
>   

That is because tar does not produce output for you to pipe to gzip 
because you have directed it to output to file.tar.  Either omit the -f 
file.tar parameter for tar to output to stdout so you can pipe it, or 
use the -z switch to ask tar to run gzip for you ( and you might want to 
change the file name to .tar.gz ). 

> => the TAR command works great
> => The mailx command works great also
> BUT the GZIP command does not work at all... the gz file created is
> empty... so i guess my syntax is wrong.
>
> I have been trying many many different syntaxes.
> Sometimes with the pipe, sometimes with the semi-column, etc..
>
> I have also tried the tar option -z (which invokes gzip) : the gz file was
> created, it contained my data, but nothing was compressed !!
>   

If you added the -z switch then the file was compressed. 

> Thank you for helping, since i am about to forget about using gzip...
> (fyi, i currently use "compress" which works fine, but does not compress as
> much as gzip...)
>
>   

If you are looking for better compression ratios, you might try bzip2 ( 
use the -j switch to tar instead of -z).  It looks like you don't really 
want to keep the output file, you just want to mail it.  If that is the 
case then you can just do this:

cd (my directory) ; tar -cj *.csv uuencode | mailx -s Subject 
address@hidden