file compression and archiving: zip, unzip, bzip2, and tar

zip, unzip, bzip2, and tar are file compression and archiving tool in unix like systems.

gzip and bzip2 are for compressing single file. bzip2 is more efficient than gzip to compress the file but takes more time to do the compression.
zip and tar are for compressing and archiving file. tar can use gzip or bzip2 to do the comopress and then archive.

gzip, compress the given files with Lempel-Ziv coding.

gzip data.txt #compress data.txt to data.txt.gz
gzip data1.txt data2.txt #compress data1.txt and data2.txt to data1.txt.gz, data2.txt.gz
gzip *.txt #compress all the txt files in the current directory

gunzip, decompress the gz files

gunzip data.txt.gz #decompress data.txt.gz to data.txt
gunzip data1.txt.gz data2.txt.gz #decompress data1.txt.gz and data2.txt.gz to data1.txt, data2.txt
gunzip *.gz #decompress all the gz files in the current directory

bzip2, compress files with the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting text compression algorithm and Huffman coding.

bzip2 data.txt #compress data.txt to data.txt.bz2
bzip2 data1.txt data2.txt #compress data1.txt and data2.txt to data1.txt.bz2, data2.txt.bz2
bzip2 *.txt #compress all the txt files in the current directory

bzip2 -d, decompress bz2 files

bzip2 -d data.txt.bz2 #compress data.txt.bz2 to data.txt
bzip2 data1.txt data2.txt #compress data1.txt.bz2 and data2.txt.bz2 to data1.txt, data2.txt
bzip2 *.bz2 #compress all the bz2 files in the current directory

zip, compressing file and packaging it into a zip file, keeping the input file untouched.

zip data.zip data1.txt data2.txt #compressing data1.txt and data2.txt and packaging them into data.zip

unzip, extract compressed files from a zip package.

unzip data.zip #extracting files from data.zip

tar, compressing and archiving files. It supports archive compressing through gzip and bzip2. If you are compressing more than 2 files, tar is recommended instead of gzip or bzip2

tar -zcvf data.tgz data1.txt data2.txt #compress and archive data1.txt and data2.txt into data.tgz using gzip compress
tar -jcvf data.tbz2 data1.txt data2.txt #compress and archive data1.txt and data2.txt into data.tbz2 using bzip2 compress

tar, extract compressed files from tgz and tbz2 file

tar -zxvf data.tgz
tar -jxvg data.tbz2