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Linux Commands - Archiving and Compression

Sanjaya Subedi

• 1 min read

Commonly used flags:

      • -c: Create a new archive
      • -f: Create a output file.
      • -x: Extract from tar archive.
      • -t: List the contents of tar without extracting.
      • -r: Append file to an existing archive
    • Example:
    • Commonly used flags:
      • -l: List compressed size, uncompressed size, ratio, uncompressed name
      • —v: enable verbose
    • Example:

gzip: Compression utility that uses DEFLATE compression algorithm.Basic Syntax: gzip [OPTIONS] FILE

gzip myarchive.tar
#view result using ls
myarchive.tar.gz
#unzip
gunzip myarchive.tar.gz
#view result using ls
myarchive.tar

tar: It is used to create, manipulate and extract tar archives.Basic Syntax: tar [OPTIONS] FILE...

#create tar archive of file or directory
tar -cf myarchive.tar test/
#append files in existing archive
tar -rf myarchive.tar cust_data.sql
#list the contents of tar without extracting
tar -tf myarchive.tar
#result
backupScript/
cust_data.sql
#extract specific file from archive
tar -xf myarchive.tar cust_data.sql
#view extracted file
test@test:~$ ls
cust_data.sql  myarchive.tar