How to Compress Large Tar Files – Reduce Tar File Size with Gzip

I cobbled together some python to do what you want. It uses python's tarfile library to append stdin to a tar file, and then simply seeks back in the tar to rewrite the header with the right size at eof. The usage would be:

rm -f mytar
for db in $dbs
do mysqldump ... $db | gzip -c |
   tarappend -t mytar -f mysql-backup-$db.gz
done
tar tvf mytar

Here's the tarappend python script:

#!/usr/bin/python
# concat stdin to end of tar file, with given name. meuh on stackexchange
# $Id: tarappend,v 1.3 2015/07/08 11:31:18 meuh $

import sys, os, tarfile, time, copy
from optparse import OptionParser
try:
    import grp, pwd
except ImportError:
    grp = pwd = None

usage = """%prog: ... | %prog -t tarfile -f filename
Appends stdin to tarfile under the given arbitrary filename.
tarfile is created if it does not exist.\
"""

def doargs():
    parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
    parser.add_option("-f", "--filename", help="filename to use")
    parser.add_option("-t", "--tarfile", help="existing tar archive")
    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
    if options.filename is None or options.tarfile is None:
        parser.error("need filename and tarfile")
    if len(args):
        parser.error("unknown args: "+" ".join(args))
    return options

def copygetlen(fsrc, fdst):
    """copy data from file-like object fsrc to file-like object fdst. return len"""
    totlen = 0
    while 1:
        buf = fsrc.read(16*1024)
        if not buf:
            return totlen
        fdst.write(buf)
        totlen += len(buf)

class TarFileStdin(tarfile.TarFile):
    def addstdin(self, tarinfo, fileobj):
        """Add stdin to archive. based on addfile() """
        self._check("aw")
        tarinfo = copy.copy(tarinfo)
        buf = tarinfo.tobuf(self.format, self.encoding, self.errors)
        bufoffset = self.offset
        self.fileobj.write(buf)
        self.offset += len(buf)

        tarinfo.size = copygetlen(fileobj, self.fileobj)
        blocks, remainder = divmod(tarinfo.size, tarfile.BLOCKSIZE)
        if remainder > 0:
            self.fileobj.write(tarfile.NUL * (tarfile.BLOCKSIZE - remainder))
            blocks += 1
        self.offset += blocks * tarfile.BLOCKSIZE
        # rewrite header with correct size
        buf = tarinfo.tobuf(self.format, self.encoding, self.errors)
        self.fileobj.seek(bufoffset)
        self.fileobj.write(buf)
        self.fileobj.seek(self.offset)
        self.members.append(tarinfo)

class TarInfoStdin(tarfile.TarInfo):
    def __init__(self, name):
        if len(name)>100:
            raise ValueError(name+": filename too long")
        if name.endswith("/"):
            raise ValueError(name+": is a directory name")
        tarfile.TarInfo.__init__(self, name)
        self.size = 99
        self.uid = os.getuid()
        self.gid = os.getgid()
        self.mtime = time.time()
        if pwd:
            self.uname = pwd.getpwuid(self.uid)[0]
            self.gname = grp.getgrgid(self.gid)[0]

def run(tarfilename, newfilename):
    tar = TarFileStdin.open(tarfilename, 'a')
    tarinfo = TarInfoStdin(newfilename)
    tar.addstdin(tarinfo, sys.stdin)
    tar.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    options = doargs()
    run(options.tarfile, options.filename)

A plain .tar archive created with cf (with or without v) is uncompressed; to get a .tar.gz or .tgz archive, compress it:

gzip < my_files.tar > my_files.tgz

You might want to add -9 for better compression:

gzip -9 < my_files.tar > my_files.tgz

Both variants will leave both archives around; you can use

gzip -9 my_files.tar

instead, which will produce my_files.tar.gz and delete my_files.tar (if everything goes well). You can then rename my_files.tar.gz to my_files.tgz if you wish.

With many tar implementations you can extract archives without specifying the z option, and tar will figure out what to do — so you can use the same command with compressed and uncompressed archives.