Compress unix file tar

And, the slower the compression higher level of compression attempts, i. You can set your own preference by varying the compression level from -1 fast to -9 slow. There are two other common compression algorithms which one may explore and test different algorithm options also give different sizing outcomes, and may have additional compression options , and that is bzip2 , which can be used by specifying the -j option to tar , and XZ which can be used by specifying the -J option.

Alternatively, you can use the -I command to set maximum compression options for bzip2 -9 :. As you can see, the results are less good in this case then using the somewhat standard GZIP algorithm. Still, the bzip2 and xz algorithms may show improvements with other data sets. Decompressing a file is super easy, whatever the original method was to compress it, and provided that such compression algorithm is present on your computer.

For example, if the original compression algorithm was bzip2 indicated by a. Compressing files can help you save a lot of room on your storage devices, and knowing how to use tar in combination with available compression options will help you to do so. Once the archive needs to be extracted again, it is easy to do so provided the correct decompression software is available on the computer used to decompress or extract the data from your archive. The above article may contain affiliate links, which help support CloudSavvy IT.

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Since we launched in , our articles have been read more than 1 billion times. What is the tar command? The syntax is shown below: tar [flags] destinationFileName sourceFileName The tar command uses the following flags to customize the command input: Flag Explanation Usage -c Create a new archive.

We use this flag whenever we need to create a new archive. When we specify this flag, it means that archive will be created using gzip compression. Providing the -v flag shows details of the files compressed. Archive file names are mapped using the -f flag.

We use this flag when files need to be extracted from an archive. How to create an archive We have a list of the following files which we'll compress with tar. List of files to be compressed. In the results below, we can see that the archive has been created successfully. Archive has been created with supplied command. How to remove files after compression Let's say we don't want to keep the original files after creating an archive.

How to view the contents of an archive You might need to view the contents of an archive without actually extracting it. Viewing contents of an archive. Extracting an archive. The command you can use to search in compressed files is zgrep : Contents of a file 'audit. We can search for a string in an archive using the below command: zgrep -Hna 'string-to-search' compressedFile.