Ant: TAR and GZIP task

You can create an ant task called, tar task, to compress a directory instead of manually creating the tar in command line.

http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/tar.html

Insert below text in your build.xml file for your project:

<tar destfile="${dist}/manual.tar" basedir="htdocs/manual"/>

<gzip destfile="${dist}/manual.tar.gz" src="${dist}/manual.tar"/>