UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello All,

I have been seeing a weird(at least for me, at this point) issue with a specific tar command.

1st fashion)
Normally, if i have to tar anything at the command line I tend to use
tar -cvzf <tar-file_name.tgz> <directory_to_be_tarred>
this command works perfectly fine with out any problem or hiccups.

2nd fashion)
I then had a situation where i needed only the files to be tarred and had to exclude the directory name under which the file were being tar'ed
for example:
my_directory
--- my_file
--- my_file
--- my_file

I only had to tar the files, did some search and ended up using the belowcommand
tar -cvjf <my_directory.tar.gz> -C <my_directory> .

where: The -C my_directory tells tar to change the current directory to my_directory, and then . means "add the entire current directory"

Now the issue: Couple of these file are 7GB and 4GB, when I do the tar in the first fashion the tar ball get created under 10 minutes, but when I use the 2nd fashion the creation of tar ball takes significant amount of time, on an avaerage it take 90 minutes to complete the tar ball.

Wanted to understand why this happens and what needs to be done to correct it.
Please advice.

---------- Post updated at 10:18 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:02 AM ----------

Is the difference due to
tar -cvzf (1st fashion)
against
tar -cvjf (2nd fashion)

yes ... the 1st one uses gzip to compress the file after creating the tarball while the 2nd one uses bzip2 ... to properly compare the difference, you need to compress the resulting tarball the same way ...