Deleting files after adding to tar archive

Question

Can GNU tar add many files to an archive, deleting each one as it is added?

This is useful when there is not enough disk space to hold both the entire tar archive and the original files - and therefore it is not possible to simply manually delete the files after creating an archive in the usual way.

Solution 1

With GNU tar, use the option --remove-files.

Solution 2

I had a task - archive files and then remove into OS installed "tar" without GNU-options.

Method:

Use "xargs"

Suppose, we are have a directory with files.
Need move all files, over the week into tar and remove it.
I do one archive (arc.tar) and added files to it. (You can create new archive every try)

Solution:

find ./ -mtime +7 | xargs -I % sh -c 'tar -rf arc.tar % && rm -f %'

Solution 3

For non GNU tar, you can use "-u" to proccess file per file in a loop

tar -cf archive.tar afile
for myfile in dir/*.ext
do
    tar -uf archive.tar $myfile && rm $myfile || echo "error tar -uf archive.tar $myfile"
done

Comments

[Eugene S]

Are you sure that by using this flag will remove each file after adding it to the archive rather than deleting all the files in the end of the process?

[Fred Foo]

@EugeneS: I checked the GNU tar source code and there is some (configurable) delay between archiving and removal, but tar will not wait for the entire tarball to be created.

[dpb]

How about bsdtar? Anyone?

[Viacheslav Dobromyslov]

Works great. Helps to make backups by pg_dump -Fd

[Melebius]

1. I would use && instead of ; between tar and rm commands, so only remove files if their addition to the archive was successful. 2. Consider using -exec option if your find has it. stackoverflow.com/a/6043896/711006

[double-beep]

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