gzipping up a set of directories and creating a tar compressed file

Question

My bash fu is not what it should be.

I want to create a little batch script which will copy a list of directories into a new zip file.

There are (at least) t

Answer 1

You can create a gzipped tar on the commandline as follows:

tar czvf mytar.tar.gz dir1 dir2 .. dirN

If you wanted to do that in a bash script and pass the directories as arguments to the script, those arguments would end up in $@. So then you have:

tar czvf mytar.tar.gz "$@"

If that is in a script (lets say myscript.sh), you would call that as:

./myscript.sh dir1 dir2 .. dirN

If you want to read from a list (your option 1) you could do that like so (this does not work if there is whitespace in directory names):

tar czvf mytar.tar.gz $(