Backups using compress

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <25106 at adm.brl.mil> dpence at redstone-emh2.army.mil ( Dwayne Pence) writes:
>Does anyone know of a way to compress files before sending them through 
>cpio or tar to tape without actually creating a ".Z" file on disk.

No, because cpio and tar open the files individually and have no provisions
for per-file filtration.  What most people do is to compress the archive,
not the individual files; that also should generally be more compact.
In this method you can simply pipe the archive through "compress".