It is very easy to compress a Whole Linux/UNIX directory. It is useful to backup files, email all files, or even to send software you have created to friends. Technically, it is called as a compressed archive. GNU tar command is best for this work. It can be use on remote Linux or UNIX server. It does two things for you:
=> Compress the archive
You need to use the tar command as follows (syntax of tar command):
tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name
Where,
- -z : Compress archive using gzip program
- -c: Create archive
- -v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
- -f: Archive File name
For example, say you have a directory called /home/jerry/prog and you would like to compress this directory then you can type tar command as follows:
$ tar -zcvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz /home/jerry/prog
Above command will create an archive file called prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz in current directory. If you wish to restore your archive then you need to use the following command (it will extract all files in current directory):
$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz
Where,
- -x: Extract files
If you wish to extract files in particular directory, for example in /tmp then you need to use the following command:
$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz -C /tmp
$ cd /tmp
$ ls -
A note about non gnu/tar command
The above syntax use GNU tar command for compressing and uncompressing tar files. If your system does not use GNU tar, you can still create a compressed tar file, via the following syntax:
tar -cvf - file1 file2 dir3 | gzip > archive.tar.gz