Compressing folders in linux

How to Compress a Folder in Linux Using Gzip: A Beginner’s Guide

Learn how to compress a folder in Linux using Gzip and Tar commands. Follow helpful tips and best practices to avoid common issues and make the most of Gzip.

• Understanding gzip and its limitations
• Using tar and gzip to compress a folder
• How to Gzip a Directory in Linux Command Line
• Basic commands for compressing files and folders in Linux
• Advantages and disadvantages of using gzip
• Helpful tips and best practices
• Other simple Gzip commands for compressing folders and files in Linux
• Conclusion
• How do I gzip a GZ file in Linux?
• How do I gzip a GZ file?
• What is a .GZ folder?
• What is .GZ file in Linux?

Gzip is a popular file compression utility for Linux systems that can reduce the file size while maintaining the original file mode, ownership, and timestamp. However, gzip cannot compress a folder directly, and in this post, we will show you how to gzip a folder in Linux using tar and gzip commands. We will also cover the basic commands for compressing files and folders in Linux, the advantages and disadvantages of using gzip, and some helpful tips and best practices .

Understanding gzip and its limitations

Gzip is an open-source file compression utility that compresses files to save disk space and reduce file transfer times. However, it has some limitations. Gzip can only compress a single file and is unable to compress a folder directly. Gzip is a compressing tool that truncates the file size while keeping the original file mode, ownership, and timestamp. The -r option can compress every file in a folder and its subfolders. Gzip cannot work with directories, only files.

Using tar and gzip to compress a folder

To compress a folder in Linux, you need to use tar and gzip commands. Tar is used to collate files into one archive file, and gzip is used to compress the archive file. The tar command can create and extract .tar.gz files. Here’s an example of how to use tar and gzip to compress a folder:

tar -czvf foldername.tar.gz /path/to/folder 

The above command creates a .tar.gz file for the folder located at /path/to/folder. The -c option creates a new archive, -z option compresses the archive with gzip, -v option shows the progress of the archive creation, and -f option specifies the filename of the archive.

To extract the compressed folder, you can use the following command:

The above command extracts the contents of the compressed folder into the current directory. The -x option extracts the archive, and -z option decompresses the archive using gzip.

How to Gzip a Directory in Linux Command Line

How do you gzip a folder in Linux? You can easily zip a file but if you try to zip a directory Duration: 1:36

Basic commands for compressing files and folders in Linux

Here are some basic commands for compressing files and folders in Linux:

Gzip

Gzip is the most popular file compression utility for Linux systems. The gzip command can compress a single file and create a .gz file. Here’s an example of how to use gzip to compress a file:

The above command compresses the file filename.txt and creates a compressed file named filename.txt.gz.

You can use the following command to decompress the compressed file:

The above command decompresses the compressed file and restores the original file.

Tar

The tar command will collate all the files into one archive file. Here’s an example of how to use tar to create an archive file:

tar -cvf archive.tar file1 file2 file3 

The above command creates an archive file named archive.tar that includes file1, file2, and file3.

You can use the following command to extract the contents of the archive file:

The above command extracts the contents of the archive file into the current directory.

Gunzip

Gunzip is used to extract a .gz file. Here’s an example of how to use gunzip to extract a compressed file:

The above command extracts the compressed file named filename.txt.gz and restores the original file.

Advantages and disadvantages of using gzip

Like any other tool, gzip has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are some of them:

Advantages

• Reduces file transfer times
• Saves disk space
• Preserves original file mode, ownership, and timestamp

Disadvantages

Best practices for using gzip

To make the most of gzip and avoid common issues, here are some helpful tips and best practices:

• Compress files that are not already compressed
• Avoid compressing files that are frequently accessed
• Use the -9 option for maximum compression
• Use the -c option for outputting to stdout

Helpful tips and best practices

Here are some additional tips and best practices:

• Use a gzip cheatsheet to master the command’s options and syntax
• Use popular programming languages like Python and Java to work with gzip
• Be careful when deleting the original file to avoid data loss
• Make sure you have enough disk space before compressing a file or folder

Other simple Gzip commands for compressing folders and files in Linux

In Shell , for example, unzip folder .gz file in linux code sample

In Shell , unzip a .gz file in linux code sample

In Shell case in point, unzip linux gz code sample

In Shell , gzip folder .gz file in linux code sample

tar -zcvf archive.tar.gz directory/

In Shell as proof, unzip GZ File Linux code example

# Unzip GZ file gunzip file.gz or gzip -d file.gz

In Shell , for example, unzip GZ File Linux code sample

Unzip a . GZ file by typing "gunzip" into the "Terminal" window

Conclusion

Gzip is a powerful tool for compressing files in linux systems, but it cannot compress a folder directly. To compress a folder, use the tar command first and then gzip the resulting archive file. Gzip is the most popular file compression utility for Linux systems and offers advantages such as reducing file transfer times and saving disk space. However, it also has disadvantages such as slower processing times and potential loss of file quality. By following some helpful tips and best practices, you can make the most of gzip and avoid common issues.

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How do I compress a directory?

I’m trying to compress a directory and ftp it to a windows ftp. I have tried every tar command I can find to compress a directory. It appears to be ok. Then I transfer it and view it’s contents using Winrar. Winrar keeps telling me the file is corrupted. I have viewed other .gz or .bz2 files using winrar but for some odd reason I can’t get it to work. I would prefer just to have it zip the files so they have a .zip extension but even then when i try to browse it’s contents both windows and winrar claim it’s corrupt. Does anyone else have a suggestion as to something else to try?

3 Answers 3

Well, most probably your files are perfectly fine before FTP transmission.

Unfortunately, probably you are transferring your files using wrong FTP mode.

FTP do have two modes: binary and ASCII. By default most clients use ASCII mode, which breaks your binary files completely. I don’t know which FTP client you are using, but for example in ncftp you can use command «binary» to switch to binary mode.

If you want to create ZIP files using Ubuntu (or almost any other Linux), use zip . You can install it to Ubuntu by running

Then you can create zip file by running

zip -r compressed_filename.zip foldername 

On related note, you should know that FTP is insecure transmission protocol. Consider switching to sftp, for example. There is many free ssh servers for Windows, including minimal OpenSSH port.

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Management of Zipped or Compressed Folders With Linux Terminal

Sometimes, when you need to create a .zip archive on a Linux machine, it is not that much easy as it is in windows. Every time, you need to download a larger number of files or numerous tasks, or even when you need a backup for a website, you need to learn few basic commands for zipping and unzipping the folders in Linux. For compression of archive files, we happen to use the zip command. It is a utility for compression and file packaging. We also have a program called unzip that is used to unpack the zip archives. This tutorial will help you learn to compress and manage a folder on Ubuntu Linux using the command line.

Zip or compress the folder

For the purpose of compression, we need to install the zip command at first, for which we will use “apt command” or “apt-get command”. So, now we will open the terminal to install the zip command.

After opening the terminal, write the command, “sudo apt install zip unzip” to install the zip command.

Enter the required credentials.

The installation begins and the command line looks like this. After a few moments, it will be done.

The next step is to compress the required files using the zip command. We want to compress the folder named TestDir here whose current directory is Desktop.

So, therefore in command line in Linux, we will also change our current directory to the desktop.

We can see the currently present folders on our Desktop by using ls command.

The file we want to compress is also in the list.

We use the command “zip –r folderName folder” to which we want to compress our folder.

Eventually, the compressed TestDirTerminal.zip is created, which we wanted to create by compressing our folder TestDir, so as we can see it has been created.

The folder we wanted to compress has been compressed.

We can also compress the files using the command line in Linux. We have chosen a folder, TestFolder for this purpose and a file TestFile as you can see. Both are again located on the Desktop. We will compress a file and a folder respectively in this step.

We will move our current directory to Desktop if it is not selected earlier. After doing that we see the elements of the directory using “dir” command. We can find anything of our interest enlisted where TestFolder and TestFile are also listed.

For the sake of zipping the folder, we will use the following command.

Similarly, we want to zip the file we will use the following command as follows.

This will zip our TestFile.

Once created, both the TestFile and Testfolder.zip can be seen at the Desktop.

Using gzip command

We can also use gzip command to compress a file as we did with the GroceryList.

The outcome shows that a GroceryList.gz has been created at the Desktop directory.

Using tar command

For too many files we will use tar command. Here we have GroceryList so, for this we will be using tar cvf

V: to display the output in the terminal (used for verification)

We can always use the ls command for the verification Here, as you can see the GroceryList.tar has been created.

Unzip the compressed folder:

To unzip the file, we will be using the command, unzip. But at first, we need to install the unzip code as we did earlier for zipping. We use the command sudo apt-get install unzip for this purpose. The command is used as

This will be installed eventually. You may see the following commands on the screen while you run it on our own end.

For zip command

At first, we will extract our files for zip files. So as in the above list you can the first example we compressed is listed there as compressed file “TestDirTerminal.zip”, we will now compress this file by using the unzip command. Here we write unzip and the name of zipped file we want to unzip.

For tar file

The tar file will be having a varying methodology, we will be using a different method as we did while compressing so it is quite similar to that but here, for a tar file extraction, we will be using tar xvf,

V: for verification as we saw earlier

Here we had a tar file named “GroceryList.tar” so we extracted it by using the following command.

The command helps us to extract the files and once they have been extracted we can also view the outcome using the ls command for the currently running directory. So, here is the extracted file.

For verification and viewing the list of contents in a tar file we use the command tar –tvf and add the name of tar file whose contents we want to see. As a result, we will get the list of archive contents to our screens. So, following command will be used to view the archived content in a particular tar file.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have seen how to create compressed folders/ files in Linux command line. We have also learned how to extract the original files from the compressed ones in Linux command line. We also observed that for side by side verification we use ls command whether the file has been created or not the file extension makes clear to us whether it has been compressed or not if it is then, is it zip, tar or gz. At last, we saw how we can view the contents that are archived in a particular tar file.

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