Compressing and Decompressing Files

Creating archive

tar cvf example.tar /sourcedir

Extracting archive

tar xvf example.tar

Two main compression commands:

1. gzip
2. bzip2

• gzip example:

gzip bigfile.stuff
gzip -d bigfile.stuff.gz

• bzip2 example:

bzip2 bigfile.stuff
bzip2 -d bigfile.stuff.bz2

Compress an archive

Tar does not compress by default

tar czvf home.tar.gz /home

or

tar cvjf home.tar.bz2 /home

Extracting:

tar xzvf home.tar.gz /home

or

tar xvjf home.tar.bz2 /home

Zip Files

Used for files that need to be managed on both Windows and Linux servers. Zip is similar to tar, but automatically try’s to compress files.

Examples:

zip -r archivename /home
unzip archivename