UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

Is there any utility to compress an entire directory on a Sun Solaris 5.7 ? Something like "compressdir" on other flavours of Unix ?

Thanks

Check out the tar command or cpio command. Both will archive directories. Once you have created the tar-ball you can then gzip it! On Solaris, there is a program called pax though I have never used it.

i think tar does what you want....
search the man page for more information

this is a solaris question and should be posted in our new solaris forum (thx to neo) ;-)
.

Thanks google and pressy for your prompt response.

google -> My server does not have much space and backing up on tape would have taken much time and anyway, I wanted free space temporarily. Hence, I was looking for something, which would compress contents of all sub-directories.
gzip is available on our server, which has an option -r, which recursively compresses all files of a specified directory.

Pressy - > This topic should have been opened in Solaris forum. Please excuse me.

Tar is more than a tape backup program. Tar w/ gzip installed on the server would be able to create a compressed recursive backup of directory that you need backed up. I use this quite frequently when I need a quick backup of a website. I believe tar is recursive from the directory that you started down the tree.

try using:

"tar -cpz * > filename.tar.gz"

I used * as wildcard to take everything in the dir i am in and everythign underneath it, but you can specify any file or dir that you want.