Unix: Visual QuickStart Guide

Compressing files with compress

Compressing a file just means making it smaller so that it takes up less hard-disk space. It's like filling a toy box, closing the lid, then sitting on it to moosh the contents so that they fit into a smaller space. Any time you create a file that you'll be sending via ftp or that people will access through the Web, you'll want to compress the file so that it takes less time to send, download, or whatever. As Code Listing 13.8 shows, you compress files using the compress command.

To compress a file with compress:

• compress labrea.tar

  At the shell prompt, type compress followed by the file name. Here, we're compressing a tarred file, which contains multiple files. As you can see in Code Listing 13.8, the compressed ...