Compressing STDIN and STDOUT with BZIP2

Sometimes You might need to compress something but You are not sure how to do it. Well, there are few tricks that bzip2 has up it’s sleave.

Compressing

• Saving compressed docker image for local transfer to other server
  • docker build -t imgname . && docker save imgname | bzip2 > imgname.bz2
• Dumping Postgres database to raw sql but compressing it at same time
  • pg_dump -Unrcrm database_name | bzip2 > dump.sql.bz2
  • pg_dumpall | bzip2 > db-backup-20110701.sql.bz2
• Dumping huge database and splitting files into 700mb chunks:
  • pg_dumpall | bzip2 | split -b 690m -d - split-bz2-db-backup-20110701
• Dumping MySQL database
  • mysqldump -u userName -p myDataBase | bzip2 -c > dump.sql.bz2

Decompressing

• Loading/restoring compressed Postgres database dump
  • bzcat dump.sql.bz2 | sudo -u postgres psql database_name
  • bzip2 -d dump.sql.bz2 | sudo -u postgres psql database_name
• Loading/restoring compressed MySQL databse dump
  • bzcat dump.sql.bz2 | mysql -u name -p db
• Loading compressed docker image into local images
  • bzcat image.bz2 | docker load
• Browsing huge compressed wordlist
  • bzcat wordlist.txt.bz2 | less
  • bzless wordlist.txt.bz2

Sources

• https://www.mad-hacking.net/documentation/linux/applications/postgres/backup-restore-database.xml
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11080773/how-can-i-pipe-output-of-bzip-to-mysql-to-restore-data-directly-from-bzipped-fil

That's it for this post, thanks for reading!