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.