Compress a entire directory

kepler has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Compress a entire directory by roboticus (Chancellor) on Jul 10, 2014 at 21:00 UTC
kepler: You can do it with Archive::ZIP. Just traverse your directory tree and add the files to the ZIP file. ...roboticus When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.	[reply]
Re: Compress a entire directory by Laurent_R (Canon) on Jul 10, 2014 at 21:45 UTC
Just a side note: tar is not really a compression utility and is not aimed at compressing data. The tar utility is for building an archive of several files (i.e. storing several files into a single file, with some way of extracting them afterwards), originally on a tape, today into a single file.. Now, having said that, there are often some options of tar that implicitly call the zip, gzip or compress utilities after having built the archive to reduce the size of the archive. I am also not sure to understand whether you want to do it in Perl or not.	[reply]
Re: Compress a entire directory by thomas895 (Deacon) on Jul 11, 2014 at 00:51 UTC
In addition to what is already suggested: Read the man page for zip or tar, then choose from: Using backticks. See perlop. Using a pipe, where supported. See perlopentut and/or IPC::Open2. Using system. See it's documentation. (Also discussed in perlfaq8#How do I start a process in the background?) . ~Thomas~ "Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."	[reply]
Re: Compress a entire directory by perlfan (Parson) on Jul 11, 2014 at 14:53 UTC
Is this a Perl question or general nix? Using just nix commandline utilities, some ways to do this are: `tar czvf ./directory-to-compress ./directory-to-compress.tgz # or equivalently tar cvf - ./directory-to-compress \| gzip -c > ./directory-to-compres +s.tar.gz` [download] Suitable replacements for gzip included bzip2 and pigz. If you want to get crazy, you can use shar + gzip. `shar ./directory-to-compress \| gzip -c > directory-to-compress.shar.gz` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Compress a entire directory by DrHyde (Prior) on Jul 11, 2014 at 10:07 UTC
That you couldn't even be arsed to look at the manpages for tar(1), zip(1), Archive::Tar and Archive::Zip indicates to me that you don't actually care enough for me to bother helping you. You wouldn't even have to read very far down those pages, because the information you need is in the synopses for all four tools.	[reply]