gzip a folder and its subfolders on the fly

Question

I have a big folder that I want to send a zipped version of it while saving on the sub-folders hierarchy.

currently I'm doing it by creating a large zip file and sending it.

I'm looking for a way to write the folder content to some outputstream that will be redirected to a socket output stream.

my motivation is to avoid from keeping large files in my machine on run time

I know how to do that for a single file, but have no idea how to process a folder with many sub folders and save the inner hierarchy...

thanks!

Answer 1

It's a little unclear what you're after, since gzip has no notion of files - just bytes to be compressed - you need an archive format like tar to combine a bunch of files and directories into a single stream, and then you can gzip that.

If you just want some compressed archive format, the JDK's ZipOutputStream will let you use zip compression.

If you specifically need gzip format, there are a number of implementstions of tar output streams out there - use one of those and pipeline it into the JDK's gzip output stream.