How do I Compress a Whole Linux/UNIX Folder
This is task that you will do many times when working with Linux/UNIX. This can be automated or done just as a simple one time task. Best tool for this job is tar .
- GNU tar saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive.
GNU tar comes with many options but for my task i will use the following options only:
tar -zcvf wwww_aodba_bkp.tar.gz www/- this command will create gziped archive containing the entire content of the www/ folder called www_aodba_bkp.tar.gz.
- -z Compress archive using the gzip program
- -c Create archive
- -v Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
- -f Archive File name
To extract the content of a tar archive use the following command:
- -C Extract location
- -x Extract the content
tar -zxvf wwww_aodba_bkp.tar.gz- this will extract to the current working directory.
tar -zxvf wwww_aodba_bkp.tar.gz -C /folder- this will extract the content into /folder directory.
