compress data through a pipe

Thanks! I got gzip to work. Strange, I had tried it before but was doing something wrong I guess.

But I'm not so sure about tar only working with streams. If that's so, then what's wrong with any of this?

+mbp:~ me$ ls -al | tar -cvz > tared8+
+tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive+
+Try `tar --help' or `tar --usage' for more information.+

+mbp:~ me$ ls -al | tar -cvzf tared8+
+tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive+
+Try `tar --help' or `tar --usage' for more information.+

+mbp:~ me$ ls -al | tar -cvzf tared8 -+
+tar: -: Cannot stat: No such file or directory+
+tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors+

Yes, the gzip works.

Sorry, I think I've confused you. I used ls -al just for an example of a command generating output. I don't want to tar up the whole directory. I want to tar up the output of a command without having to write it to a file first.

I'm working with a proprietary package that gives me a command to dump out log information. The log information will be > 1 G. Rather than redirecting the command output to a file and then taring the file, I'd like to just tar the data directly through a pipe.

gzip works just fine:
command | gzip -c file1.Z

But tar won't work because it expects to work with a stream of file names, not streams of data.