File Compression in Linux

Compress an entire Directory or a single File

Use the following command to compress an entire directory or a single file on Linux. It ' ll also compress every other directory inside a directory of your specify–in other words, it works recursively.

TAR-CZVF Name-of-archive.tar.gz/path/to/directory-or-file

Here's what those switches actually mean:

• -c:create an archive.
• -z:compress the archive with gzip.
• -v:display progress in the terminal while creating the archive, also known as "verbose" mode. The V is always optional in these commands, but it ' s helpful.
• -f:allows you to specify the filename of the archive.

Let's say you has a directory named "Stuff" in the current directory and you want to save it to a file named Archive.tar. Gz. You ' d run the following command:

TAR-CZVF archive.tar.gz Stuff

Or, let's say there ' s a directory at/usr/local/something on the current system and you want to compress it to a file name D archive.tar.gz. You ' d run the following command:

TAR-CZVF archive.tar.gz/usr/local/something

File Compression in Linux