Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

tar -cvf - $DIR | gzip -c > $compressedfile.tar.gz if you're doing this from a script rather than command line, you have to note that you'll need to change directories into parent directory of the directory you want to tar up. For instance: cd /home/mydir; /usr/bin/tar -cvf - important_dir | gzip -c > important_dir.tar.gz In this case, you can put something like this into crontab if you need to do a nightly backup.