Jan
27
2011
For all (well most) of your console compressing / uncompressing needs, tar is there. All you need to do is set it to work.
It is interesting to note that compression in linux is a two stage process: files are first serialized into one stream using tar (whose initial use was serialization for tape storage), and then the stream is compressed using a library such as zip or bzip
Uncompressing a file
Assuming you downloaded a compressed file, you only need to run
# tar zxvf mycompressedfile.tar.gz
Where z is for .tar.gz files, and can be replaced with j for .tar.bz2 or even completely omitted for simple .tar files.
Note that tar always uses the current directory as a target ( where your files are extracted ), so you should change directory to where you want your files to be extracted, and then run tar using a path to the compressed file.
Compressing a whole directory
To compress an entire directory to a single compressed file, just use
# tar czfv outputfilename.tar.gz sourcedirectory/
Where z is for .tar.gz files, and can be replaced with j for .tar.bz2 or even completely omitted for simple .tar files.
If you want to just tar a file instead of a directory just use the same syntax and point it to the source file.