There are various compression formats of which the mostly used under GNU/Linux are gzip
and bzip2
.
Compression
tar.gz
To use gzip
to create .gz
package, we need to first create a container. For that tar
can be used. Packaging files into a container and compression are two different things. gzip
is mainly used for compression of a single file, which can be a container made from tar
as well.
tar -cvf filename.tar dir-or-file
gzip filename.tar
tgz
It is same as tar.gz
done using tar
.
tar -czvf filename.tgz file-or-dir
tar.bz2
tar -cvf filename.tar file-or-folder
bzip2 filename.tar
# OR
tar -cvjf filename.tar.bz2 file-or-folder
Both gzip
and bzip2
will delete the source file after compression.
Decompression (expand)
tar.gz or tgz
tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz # or filename.tgz
tar.bz2
tar -xvjf filename.tar.bz2