As a preface, I'm basically brand new to linux and learning as I go. Mostly googling my way around at the moment. I'm currently in a situation where I want to be able to compress a directory on the unraid server and then import it to my windows machine and decompress it(using 7zip for now).

 

I'm using the following command:

tar cv -C /mnt/user/Backup/Test . | xz -2vzf --threads=0 > /mnt/user/media/test

 

This is to take a folder from backup and create the .xz on the media share. The actual shares and file names are just temporary to make sure the function is working before I start doing my large real files.

 

This command works but it literally wraps every single file, so when I start unzipping on my windows machine, I have to go through and unzip the directory, then the file inside etc. I'm used to non tar stuff where you just unzip the original file and everything is open and available from there. I tried messing around without tar'ing it first, but this seems to be mandatory as xz complains the target is a directory otherwise. How can I go about achieving a normal compression structure, as I'm accustom to in windows? Or alternatively how can I decompress this on windows without having to manually extract each and every directory/subdirectory/file etc?

 

 

zip is already builtin to unRAID so you don't have to use tar.

Ah! Well that's easy and anti climatic lol. Thanks for the info

For the sake of learning, could anyone share with me why that above string was causing each file to be independently wrapped? 

that's how tarballs (that's what the older unix people call them) are.

 

tar is literally a tape archive which is just all the file concatenated together into a single large file (the .tar) which is  how it would be written to tap. This archive is then compressed into a large single file archive (xz in your particular case)

 

I think the canonical extension for tar balls are:

* tar.Z (compress)

* tar.gz (Gzip)

* tar.bz2 (Bzip)

* tar.xz (xz)

 

but due to DOS semantics, they became

* tar.z ( unchanged since there is no uncompress outside of Unix)

* tgz

* tbz

* txz

 

Ah thanks for the info. I'll need to research a bit more on how to effectively handle them in a windows environment then

Ah thanks for the info. I'll need to research a bit more on how to effectively handle them in a windows environment then

7zip