Under Unix there are some widely used applications to archive and
compress files. tar
is used to make archives, that is collections of
files. To make a new archive:
$ tar -cvf <archive_name.tar> <file> [file...]
To extract files from an archive:
$ tar -xpvf <archive_name.tar> [file...]
To list the contents of an archive:
$ tar -tf <archive_name.tar> | less
Files can be compressed to save disk space using compress
, which is
obsolete and shouldn't be used any more, or gzip
:
$ compress <file>
$ gzip <file>
that creates a compressed file with extension .Z (compress
) or .gz
(gzip
). These programs don't make archives, but compress files
individually. To decompress, use:
$ compress -d <file.Z>
$ gzip -d <file.gz>
RMP.
The unarj
, zip
and unzip
utilities are also available. Files
with extension .tar.gz
or .tgz
(archived with tar
, then
compressed with gzip
) are very common in the Unix world. Here's how to
list the contents of a .tar.gz
archive:
$ gzip -dc <file.tar.gz> | tar tf - | less
To extract the files from a .tar.gz
archive:
$ gzip -dc <file.tar.gz> | tar xvf -