Tar Gzip On-The-Fly

I typically create tarballs by doing "tar cvf file.tar somedir" and then gzipping the resultant tarball. Sometimes there's not enough space on disk to have an intermediate uncompressed file sitting around. As an example, I just made a backup of 48 gigs of MySQL data yesterday. One handy way to avoid storing the uncompressed file on disk is to gzip on the fly.

tar cvf - somedir | gzip -c > somedir.tar.gz

In writing this post, I just noticed that you can also just give tar the -z flag to accomplish the same thing; however, explicitly piping to gzip allows you to specify options to gzip such as compression level.