Create a compressed tar archive.
Bundle a directory into a gzip-compressed tar archive, preserving the directory structure.
tar -czf backup.tar.gz documents/
printf 'Created backup.tar.gz\n'Expected output EXAMPLE
Created backup.tar.gz
Details
Run in Bash on GNU/Linux. Uses the standard tools supplied with Ubuntu; no elevated permissions are required.
Replaces backup.tar.gz if it exists. Place the archive outside the directory being archived.
Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS · · GNU bash, version 5.2.21(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) · bash 5.2.21-2ubuntu4; gzip 1.12-1ubuntu3.2; tar 1.35+dfsg-3ubuntu0.4
Test inputs, results and environment
The exact published code ran in a dedicated Linux test container with prepared inputs. Unprivileged snippet process, external networking disabled, read-only root filesystem, and a fresh temporary working directory. Fixtures and output records are isolated from the application database. Testing covers this example and its stated checks, not every input, operating system, or runtime version. The Linux container shares its host's kernel; this is not a native Windows test.
- Architecture / host kernel
- x86_64 / 6.18.54.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2
- Snippet identity / locale
- uid=65534, gid=65534 (unprivileged) / C.UTF-8
- Interpreter invocation
bash -euo pipefail -c <published code>- Container image ID
sha256:32dc2d998158b6554c99b73b533f423696a0f3e31e8cbea9db10b5eee9a2fadd- Code SHA-256
33fd7a177bedfab8d2160b73bf832c5f1d571d25c5826417d7a2603068b0a547- Dependencies
- bash 5.2.21-2ubuntu4; gzip 1.12-1ubuntu3.2; tar 1.35+dfsg-3ubuntu0.4
Test input setup
These are the prepared inputs used by the test harness. See Details above for the prerequisites and how to run this example.
mkdir documents; printf 'archive me\n' > documents/notes.txt
Observed standard output
Created backup.tar.gz
Exit code: 0. Standard error: empty. Validation: Exact stdout comparison. System-dependent values above are one recorded run.
Additional assertions that passed
Checks recorded by the test harness. Where Python assertions are shown, browser cases use Playwright and simulator cases may inspect pin transitions: result.stdout is captured output, work is the temporary directory, and Path is pathlib.Path. The harness also imports json and csv.
import tarfile
with tarfile.open('backup.tar.gz') as archive:
assert archive.extractfile('documents/notes.txt').read() == b'archive me\n'