Python write text to .tar.gz

Question

I look for a possibility to write a text file directly (OnTheFly) in a .tar.gz file with python. The best would be a solution like fobj = open (arg.file, "a") to append the text.

I want to use this feature for long log files that you are not allowed to split.

Thanks in advance

how you want to put text directly-`tar.gz` is not a text file.. you want to place `.txt` file in `.tar.gz` archive? — Andersson, Jul 06 '15 at 08:08
Excuse the misunderstanding. Yes exactly what I mean. With direct I meant OnTheFly. — FrankStein, Jul 06 '15 at 08:19

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 06 '15 at 08:25

Yes, this is possible, but most likely not in the way you'd like to use it.

.tar.gz is actually two things in one: gz or gzip is being used for compression, but this tool can only compress single files, so if you want to zip multiple files to a compressed archive, you would need to join these files first. This is what tar does, it takes multiple files and joins them to an archive.

If you have a single long logfile, just gziping it would be easier. For this, Python has the gzip module, you can write directly into the compressed file:

import gzip
with gzip.open('logfile.gz', 'a') as log:
    # Needs to be a bytestring in Python 3
    log.write(b"I'm a log message.\n")

If you definitely need to write into a tar-archive, you can use Python's tarfile module. However, this module does not support appending to a file (mode 'a'), therefore a tarfile might not be the best solution for logging.

Python write text to .tar.gz

1 Answers1

Linked