How to compress a file/directory in Linux?

In the present era computer has become necessity of human being because almost all daily life problems are being solved by computers such as health problems, education, space, automobiles etc. But your computer has limited available space in form of hard disk. In order to save your hard disk space, you should save a compress files of your data.

How to make a compress file of data?

You can make a compress file using several commands, which are as follows

• .tar
• .tar.gz
• .zip
• .rar
• .gz
• .bz2

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.tar file

tar file contains more then one file or directory in a singles file.

Some options which are used to make a tar file

• -c — create a new archive
• -f — when used with the -c option, use the filename specified for the creation of the tar file; when used with the -x option, unarchive the specified file
• -t — show the list of files in the tar file
• -v — show the progress of the files being archived
• -x — extract files from an archive
• -z — compress the tar file with gzip
• -j — compress the tar file with bzip2

To create tar file

$tar –cvf filename.tar path/to/directory/file1 file2 file3 …

To make a tar directory

$tar -cvf directory_name.tar  path/to/directory/

.tar using   files from different directories

$tar -cvf path/to/first/directory/file1  path/to/second/directory/file2

To extract a tar file

$tar -xvf file_name.tar

To check contents in a .tar file

$tar -tvf file_name.tar

or

$less  file_name.tar

Using less, your all file from archive will be shown in a new window. Press ‘q’ to come out form this window.

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.tar.gz file

.tar.gz is another way to compress a file in Linux which  is a gzipped tar archive.

To create tar file

$tar -zcvf filename.tar path/to/directory/file1 file2 file3 …

To make a tar directory

$tar -zcvf directory_name.tar  path/to/directory/

.tar using   files from different directories

$tar -zcvf path/to/first/directory/file1  path/to/second/directory/file2

To extract a tar file

$tar -zxvf file_name.tar

To check contents in a .tar file

$tar -ztvf file_name.tar

or

$less  file_name.tar.gz

Using less, your all file from archive will be shown in a new window. Press ‘q’ to come out form this window.

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.zip file

This a third way to compress a file using command line

$zip file_name.zip file1 file2 file3

or

$zip -r file_name.tar  file1 file2 file3

To extract a .zip file in your working directory use commend as follows:

$unzip file_name.zip

To check contents in a zip file

$less file_name.zip

How to add a new file in existing zip file

$ zip  -r file_name.zip file_new

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.rar file

You need a rar tool to extract .rar file. But unfortunately pre-installed package for .rar file is not available in Linux, where rar is freely available under windows operating system. rar is very familiar tool to compress a file in windows.

Let’s try to make a .rar file before installing rar tool

$rar  a file_name.rar file1 file2 file3

It will show a error as follows

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rar tool can be installed as follows in Linux operating system

$sudo apt-get install rar

or

You can install this tool by using yum as well

$sudo yum install rar

But in some distros first  you will have to install yum. Which can be installed as follows

$sudo apt-get install yum

Next, you will be asked to install yum repository   %% This portion will be covered in next article %%

After  installing  a rar tool using either sudo apt-get or sudo yum, you can create a rar file as follows

$rar a file_name.rar file1 file2 file3

To extract a rar file, use command as follows

$rar e file_name.rar

To check contents in a rar file,  use command as follows

$rar l file_name.rar

Option to  test a .rar file is as follows

$rar t file_name.rar

To recover a rar file, use command as follows

$rar r file_name.rar

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.gz file

Using this a single file can  be compressed at a time. Although you can compress more then one file but you will different .gz files for each file.

$gzip file1

Let’s try to compress more then one file at a time

$gzip file1 file2

To extract a .gz file, command can be used as follows

$gzip -d file1.gz

To extract more then one file

$gzip -d file1.gz file2.gz file3.gz

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.bz2 file

Syntax of this file format is pretty similar to .tar and .tar.gz file. Which is as follows

$tar -jcvf file_name.bz2 file1 file2 file3

To extract a .bz2 file, command can be used as follows

$tar -jxvf file_name.bz2

To check contents in a .bz2 file, command is as follows

$tar -jtvf file_name.bz2

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