How to Zip/Compress files using Terminal in Ubuntu/Linux

Use the following commands to compress your files using terminal. First, make sure you have Zip already installed in your system.

>> To install Zip: Open you terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and enter the command below:

 sudo apt-get install zip gzip tar  

>> To Zip:

 zip -r compressed_filename.zip foldername  

where:

• r: recursive
• compressed_filename.zip: name of your .zip folder you want to create. Example: magento-file-sys.zip
• folder_name: name of the folder that you want to compress

Seems to be much faster and consume almost 80%-90% less CPU processes than the one using GUI/Archive Manager.; but file size seems to be large by 10-20 MB than the one created using the menu option available in GUI/Archive Manager.

>> To Unzip:

 unzip my_arch.zip  

Zip stores relative path names by default. There are several parameter-options available for zip. For that read: the manual (man zip). For a starting this will do.

Most often you will see .tar.gz endings in linux-world. That's the product of two tools: TAR (the tape archiver) and GZIP (the GNU-Zip). Tar has got the call option to automatically gzip/gunzip files after "taring".

 tar -cvzf may_arch.tar.gz my_folder  

where:

• -c means "create"
• -v means "verbose" (sometimes bothersome and slowing down...)
• -z means "use (GNU)zip"
• -f XYZ declares the name of the output file. (You should chose a helping name like XYZ.tar.gz)

There may also be .tar.bz2 endings. This is the product of the -j parameter instead of the -z parameter: you will choose compression with BZIP2 (-> man bzip2).

To extract you simply use -x (eXtract) instead of -c (Create):

 tar -xvzf may_arch.tar.gz