Archiving and Compression

Module 09
Archiving and Compression

Exam Objective
3.1 Archiving Files on the Command Line
Objective Description
Archiving files in the user home directory
Introduction
Introduction
● In this chapter, we discuss how to manage archive files at the command
line.
● File archiving is used when one or more files need to be transmitted or
stored as efficiently as possible.
● There are two fundamental aspects which this chapter explores:
○ Archiving: Combines multiple files into one, which eliminates the overhead in
individual files and makes it easier to transmit.
○ Compression: Makes the files smaller by removing redundant information.

Compression
Compressing Files
● Compression reduces the amount of data needed to store or transmit a file
while storing it in such a way that the file can be restored.
● The compression algorithm is a procedure the computer uses to encode the

original file, and as a result, make it smaller.
● When talking about compression, there are two types:
○ Lossless: No information is removed from the file.
○ Lossy: Information might be removed from the file.

Compressing Files
● Linux provides several tools to compress files, the most common is gzip. Here we
show a file before and after compression:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ ls -l longfile*
-rw-r--r-- 1 sysadmin sysadmin 66540 Dec 20 2017 longfile.txt
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ gzip longfile.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 sysadmin sysadmin 341 Dec 20 2017 longfile.txt.gz
○ The original size of the file called longfile.txt is 66540 bytes.
○ The file is compressed by invoking the gzip command with the name of the file as the
argument.
○ After that command completes, the original file is gone, and a compressed version with a
file extension of .gz is left in its place.
○ The file size is now 341 bytes.

Compressing Files
● The gzip command will provide this information, by using the –l option, as shown
here:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ gzip -l longfile.txt.gz

compressed uncompressed ratio uncompressed_name
341 66540 99.5% longfile.txt
● Compressed files can be restored to their original form (decompression) using either
the gunzip command or the gzip –d command.
● After gunzip does its work, the longfile.txt file is restored to its original size
and file name:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ gunzip longfile.txt.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 sysadmin sysadmin 66540 Dec 20 2017 longfile.txt
Archiving
Archiving Files
● Archiving is when you compress many files or directories into one file.
● The traditional UNIX utility to archive files is called tar, which is a short
form of TApe aRchive.
● Tar has three modes that are helpful to become familiar with:
○ Create: Make a new archive out of a series of files.
○ Extract: Pull one or more files out of an archive.
○ List: Show the contents of the archive without extracting.

Archiving Files - Create Mode
tar -c [-f ARCHIVE] [OPTIONS] [FILE...]
● Creating an archive with the tar command requires two named options:
-c Create an archive.
-f ARCHIVE Use archive file. The argument ARCHIVE will be the name of the resulting archive file.
● The following example shows a tar file, also called a tarball, being created from
multiple files:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -cf alpha_files.tar alpha*
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ ls -l alpha_files.tar
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sysadmin sysadmin 10240 Oct 31 17:07 alpha_files.tar
Archiving Files - Create Mode
● Tarballs can be compressed for easier transport, either by using gzip on the archive
or by having tar do it with the -z option:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -czf alpha_files.tar.gz alpha*

sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ ls -l alpha_files.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sysadmin sysadmin 417 Oct 31 17:15 alpha_files.tar.gz
● The bzip2 compression can be used instead of gzip by substituting the -j option
for the -z option and using .tar.bz2, .tbz, or .tbz2 as the file extension:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -cjf folders.tbz School

Archiving Files - List Mode
tar -t [-f ARCHIVE] [OPTIONS]
● Given a tar archive, compressed or not, you can see what’s in it by using the -
t option. The next example uses three options:
-t List the files in the archive.
-j Decompress with the bzip2 command.
-f ARCHIVE Operate on the given archive.
● The following example lists the contents of the folders.tbz archive:

sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -tjf folders.tbz
Archiving Files - Extract Mode
tar -x [-f ARCHIVE] [OPTIONS]
● You can extract the archive with the –x option once it’s copied into a different
directory. The following example uses the similar pattern as with the other modes:
-x Extract files from an archive.
-j Decompress with the bzip2 command.
-f ARCHIVE Operate on the given archive.
● The following example extracts the contents of the folders.tbz archive:

sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -xjf folders.tbz
ZIP Files
● The ZIP file is the default archiving utility in Microsoft.
● ZIP is not as prevalent in Linux but is well supported by the zip and
unzip commands.
● The default mode of zip is to add files to an archive and compress it.
zip [OPTIONS] [zipfile [file…]]
● The following example shows a compressed archive called alpha_files.zip being

created:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ zip alpha_files.zip alpha*
● The zip command will not recurse into subdirectories by default (tar does), so you
must use the –r option to indicate recursion is to be used.
ZIP Files
● The –l list option of the unzip command lists files in .zip archives:
sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ unzip -l School.zip
Archive: School.zip
Length Date Time Name
--------- ---------- ----- ----
0 2017-12-20 16:46 School/
0 2018-10-31 17:47 School/Engineering/
● Just like tar, you can pass filenames on the command line.

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Module 09

Archiving and Compression

○ Compression: Makes the files smaller by removing redundant information.

● The compression algorithm is a procedure the computer uses to encode the

● When talking about compression, there are two types:

○ Lossless: No information is removed from the file.

○ Lossy: Information might be removed from the file.

○ The original size of the file called longfile.txt is 66540 bytes.

○ The file size is now 341 bytes.

sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ gzip -l longfile.txt.gz

○ Extract: Pull one or more files out of an archive.

○ List: Show the contents of the archive without extracting.

sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -czf alpha_files.tar.gz alpha*

sysadmin@localhost:~/Documents$ tar -cjf folders.tbz School

-t List the files in the archive.

-j Decompress with the bzip2 command.

-f ARCHIVE Operate on the given archive.

● The following example lists the contents of the folders.tbz archive:

-x Extract files from an archive.

-j Decompress with the bzip2 command.

-f ARCHIVE Operate on the given archive.

● The following example extracts the contents of the folders.tbz archive:

● The following example shows a compressed archive called alpha_files.zip being

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