Skip to content

Archive and compression

There are several options for archiving and compressing groups of files or directories. The mostly commonly used options are:

tar

See the official documentation for tar for more information.

Saves many files together into a single archive file, and restores individual files from the archive. Includes automatic archive compression/decompression options and special features for incremental and full backups.

Examples:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
  # (list contents of archive somefile.tar)
$ tar tvf somefile.tar

  # (extract contents of somefile.tar)
$ tar xvf somefile.tar

  # (extract contents of gzipped archive somefile.tar.gz)
$ tar xzvf somefile.tar.gz

  # (extract contents of bzip2 archive somefile.tar.bz2)
$ tar xjvf somefile.tar.bz2

  # (archive all ".c" files in current directory into one archive file)
$ tar cvf somefile.tar *.c

  # (archive and gzip-compress all files in a directory into one archive file)
$ tar czvf somefile.tar.gz somedirectory/

  # (archive and bzip2-compress all files in a directory into one archive file)
$ tar cjvf somefile.tar.bz2 somedirectory/

Other arguments for tar can be explored by using the man tar command.

gzip

See documention for more info.

The standard compression system for all GNU software.

Examples:

1
2
3
4
5
  # (compress file somefile - also removes uncompressed file)
$ gzip somefile

  # (uncompress file somefile.gz - also removes compressed file)
$ gunzip somefile.gz

bzip2

See the official documentation for bzip for more information.

Strong, lossless data compressor based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform. Stronger compression than gzip.

Examples:

1
2
3
4
5
  # (compress file somefile - also removes uncompressed file)
$ bzip2 somefile

  # (uncompress file somefile.bz2 - also removes compressed file)
$ bunzip2 somefile.bz2

There are several other, less commonly used, options available as well: - zip - 7zip - xz

Back to the Storage section