Linux Archive and Compressing
Below are Linux shell commands that you can use to archive and compress your files.
Tar command
Tar command is used to bundle files into one file.
To create a new tar bundle
tar -cvf files.tar file1.txt file2.txt
- cf: create a new archive, followed by the archive name
- v: specifies verbose mode (optional
List contents of tar
tar -tf files.tar
Extract contents from tar
tar -xvf files.tar -C extract_files
Gzip command
Gzip will compress the file. Once you bundle the files into one you may want to compress that file to save some space
To compress the file to the following
gzip files.tar
This will create a files.tar.gz file. If multiple files are specified then multiple gzip files will be created. One for each file.
If you need to uncompress the file, then the following command will work
gzip -d files.tar.gz
Tar and GZIP in one command
It is possible to create a tar file and then compress it to a gzip format in one command.
tar -czvf files.tar.gz files_dir
To uncompress and extract the files
tar -xzvf files.tar.gz -C extracted-dir
Zip command
The zip file format is the compress archive that is compatible with Windows operation systems. The zip command will allow you to compress into that format.
zip -r files.zip files
Unzip command
The unzip command is used to extract files from a zip format.
unzip -d zip_files files.zip