Compressing and archiving files

For dealing with directories it is normal to use the tar command, see below.

• .bz2 extension is managed by the commands bzip2, bzcat and bunzip2.
  • Deal with a single file bzip2 FILE1 FILE2…, bzcat FILEs, bzunzip2 FILEs (the file is replaced)
• .gz extension is managed by the commands gzip, zcat and gunzip.
  • Usage is the same as bzip2. It can also uncompress .zip files.
• .zip extension is managed by the commands zip and unzip.
  • Compress a directory zip -r FILE.ZIP DIR
  • Uncompress a zip, re-creating the recursive structure: unzip FILE.ZIP

The tar command

• Create a tar archive tar -cvf NEW.tar DIR1 DIR2 DIR3…
• Create a tar archive and zip it in one step tar -czvf NEW.tar.gz DIR1 DIR2 DIR3…
• Create a tar archive and bzip2 it in one step tar -cjvf NEW.tar.bz2 DIR1 DIR2 DIR3…
• List the contents of a tar archive without extracting tar -tf FILE.tar (works for compressed tars too)
• Extract a tar archive into the current directory tar -xvf FILE.tar
• Extract a tar archive into another directory (that must exist) tar -xvf FILE.tar -C DIR (that is a capital C)
• Extract only a certain path tar -xvf FILE.tar home/phil/Documents/Cacti i.e. without a leading slash. The final path is the last thing on the command line.