Linux Fundamentals, 2nd Edition

Archiving Files

Storing data can get ugly. The more data you need to store, the more disk space it requires. While disk sizes are getting larger these days, there is still a limit to how much space you have. To help with that, you can use some Linux file archiving tools to help compress data files for storage and sharing. This section takes a look at how Linux handles compressing and archiving both files and directories.

Compressing Files

If you’ve done any work in the Microsoft Windows world, no doubt you’ve used zip files. The PKZip compression utility became the de facto way to compress data and executable files in Windows, so much so that Microsoft eventually incorporated it into the Windows operating system starting with XP as the compressed ...