[joseluisq]

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.