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I want to tar the output of a command, say cat hello.world, to a compressed tar file.

I don’t want to save a temporary file and later tar it manually.

How can I do this?

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  • tar pretty much requires real files, in order to give meaningful names in the archive. Your best bet is probably to use the tarfile module of Python.
    – Toby Speight
    May 10, 2016 at 17:01

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tar files store not just the contents of files but also the file names, the file permissions, and more. None of that applies to "the output of a command."

From your description, it sounds like you just need gzip. For example:

command | gzip >output.gz

This captures the output of command, compresses it, and saves it to file output.gz.

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    +1 tar is a tool to join multiple files into one, the compression options are just a convenience to use it together with gzip and the like.
    – l0b0
    May 8, 2016 at 15:48

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