Continually compressing a stderr stream

Question

Is there some way to continually compress the output of a program (in almost realtime)?

For example I have this program that produces (a lot of) output to stderr. I want to do something like ./my-program 2> tar -<someoptions> stderroutput.tar.gz

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you want to compress the contents of the standard error stream and save it to a file. If so, try this: ./my-program 2>&1 | gzip > stderroutput.gz

Answer 2

tar does not compress data; it is designed only to archive multiple files into one. To compress streams, you would need to use gzip, xz, bzip2 or similar. (While gzip has the worst compression rate, it is also one of the fastest, so it might be the best choice here.)

For example:

myapp 2> >(gzip > stderr.gz)

or

(myapp 2>&1 1>&3 | gzip > stderr.gz) 3>&1