tarchiver.py

#/usr/bin/env python3

# 04 October 2018, Falcon Heights, MN
# Peter L. Morrell - tired of manually creating tarred and bzipped archives
# 24 April 2019, Falcon Heights, MN
# Returned to this and got it to work!

# Needed for arguments below
import os
import sys
import tarfile

Usage = """

Usage:
python tarchiver.py directory_name
"""

if len(sys.argv) < 1:
    print(Usage)
    exit(1)

#####
#   Defining arguments
#####
#   A description of the program
DESCR = """A Python tool for archiving directories. This was created to archive
old projects that are taking up disk space.

Pass a directory as the only argument. The original directory is not modified,
but a new file that is tarred and compressed with bzip2 is created. The tarred
archive takes the name of the directory."""
#   Create a new argument parser

try:
    directory_name = sys.argv[1]
    #print(directory_name)
except:
    print('Please pass directory_name')


tar = tarfile.open(directory_name + ".tar.bz2", "w:bz2")
os.chdir(directory_name)
for name in os.listdir(directory_name):
    #print(name)
    tar.add(name)
tar.close()