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linuxstdincompression

Compress files while reading data from STDIN


Is it possible to compress (create a compressed archive) data while reading from stdin on Linux?


Solution

  • Yes, use gzip for this. The best way is to read data as input and redirect the compressed to output file i.e.

    cat test.csv | gzip > test.csv.gz
    

    cat test.csv will send the data as stdout and using pipe-sign gzip will read that data as stdin. Make sure to redirect the gzip output to some file as compressed data will not be written to the terminal.