can someone tell me if is possible to directly compress stdout?
I would like to do this in one step without creating temporary file files.txt...
Example:
cat file* > files.txt
tar -czf files.tar files.txt
rm files.txt
Is this possible?
You can bypass the tar part of .tar.gz in this case, since you don't need to handle multiple files, and skip straight to gzip for compression.
To compress
gzip < file > file.gz
To decompress
gzip -d file.gz
or equivalently
gunzip file.gz
You can also use the bzip2 and xz compression utilities with similar syntax. xz usually produces smaller compressed files than either gzip or bzip2.
(Footnote)
If you are creating a compressed file and then using scp to transfer it, you can use built-in compression:
cat file | ssh -C user@remote 'cat >> remote_file'
or
scp -C file user@remote:/path/on/remote
or
rsync -avz file user@remote:/path/on/remote
