Tar (+GZip) individual (sql) files in a folder

I had been backing up a MySQL database with a simple shell script for a while now. What I somehow forgot to add to the script was a command to compress the SQL dumps before uploading them to my backup server. The script had been running for a few months, so manually compressing each file wasn’t much of an option. So I wrote this little shell script do the work for me.

The script places all of the sql files individually into a tar archive with GZip compression. The new file uses the old file’s name with “.tar.gz” appended at the end. The old file is deleted after the compressed archive has been created.

You can of course do this for other files, just change the *.sql mask to work with different files. If for some reason you just want TAR files without the GZip compression, replace the tar line in the script with “tar cvf "${file}".tar "${file}"“.

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