If you need built-in password support that works easily across both Linux and Windows, consider using or Zip instead of tarballs.
OpenSSL is installed on almost every Unix-like system, making it highly portable. password protect tar.gz file
tar -czvf - : Creates the compressed archive and sends it to "stdout" (the pipe). If you need built-in password support that works
| tar -xzvf - : Pipes the decrypted content directly to tar for extraction. Method 2: Using OpenSSL | tar -xzvf - : Pipes the decrypted
zip -r -e --password=yourpassword -AES256 secured_backup.zip my_folder/
The process is a marriage of two distinct utilities. First, tar gathers the files and compresses them into a stream of data. Then, using the "pipe" ( | ) operator—the conduit that allows Linux tools to communicate—we pass that stream directly to openssl . Here, the data is scrambled using a cipher (usually AES-256, the industry standard for modern encryption) and locked with a password provided by the user.