A small experiment with a 143M directory. $ tar -zcvf file.tar.gz directory/ $ du -sh directory.tar.gz 57M directory.tar.gz $ find directory/* -print

A small experiment with a 143M directory. $ tar -zcvf file.tar.gz directory/ $ du -sh directory.tar.gz 57M directory.tar.gz $ find directory/* -print | rev | sort | rev | \ tar --create --no-recursion --files-from - | \ gzip -c > directory.tar.gz $ du -sh directory.tar.gz 55M directory.tar.gz 3.51% (2MB) reduction makes many sense here.