How do I password protect a .tgz file with tar in Unix?

Question

I'm using the Unix tar command as follows to tar up a directory and its files:

tar cvzf fileToTar.tgz directoryToTar

Is there a way to password protect the .tgz file? I've created password-protected ZIP files on Windows so I would assume Unix has the same capability. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Use crypt or gpg on the file.

Answer 2

You can use command:

zip -P password file.zip file

Or better:

zip -e password file.zip file

man zip

Answer 3

Neither the tar format nor the gz format has built-in support for password-protecting files.

The Windows zip format combines several different piece of functionality: compression (e.g. gzip), archiving multiple files into one (e.g. tar), encryption (e.g. gnupg), and probably others. Unix tends to have individual tools, each of which does one thing well, and lets you combine them.

The Unix equivalent of a password-protected .zip file would probably be called something like foo.tar.gz.gpg or foo.tgz.gpg.

And there are open-source zip and unzip tools for Unix, though they may not provide all the capabilities of the Windows versions (I'm fairly sure the newer .zipx format isn't supported).

Answer 4

You can use ccrypt.

Things can be encrypted by a pipe:

tar cvvjf - /path/to/files | ccrypt > backup.tar.bz2.cpt

Or in place:

ccrypt backup.tar.bz2

For automating, you can save a passkey into a file and use this passkey to encrypt:

ccrypt -k ~/.passkey backup.tar.bz2