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File Archives and Compression

Making a compressed file archive is good for two reasons. The more obvious reason is to save space. The second and less obvious reason is because with a compressed archive file you are able to group many files into a single file that is easier to work with. Assuming you put a lot of files in a directory and you want to get all of the files in the directory into a single file, here is a table of the commands you could use, and the commands to expand or uncompress:

Grouping/Compression Command Resulting File Expanding Command
tar cvf file.tar directory/ file.tar tar xvf file.tar
tar cvfz file.tar.gz directory/ file.tar.gz tar xvf file.tar.gz
zip file.zip directory/ file.zip unzip file.zip
bzip2 file.tar file.tar.bz2 bunzip2 file.tar.bz2
compress file file.Z uncompress file.Z


This table should help you with compression and file archives.


next up previous contents index
Next: Using Floppies Up: Data Backup Previous: Data Backup   Contents   Index
Joseph Colton 2002-09-24