Compressing and archiving files

There is a difference between a compressed and an archive file. So, what is an archive file? It is a collection of files and directories that are stored in a single file. An archive file is not a compressed file.

What is a compressed file? This is a collection of files and directories stored in one file. It uses less disk space for storage.

 

In this section, we are going to discuss two compression tools:

• bzip2
• zip

Getting ready

You should have files to archive and compress.

How to do it...

First, let's see how we can compress the files:

1. We are going to look at compression with the help of bzip2. Decide which file to compress and run the following command:

$ bzip2 filename

Using bzip2, we can compress multiple files and directories at the same time. Just separate them by putting a space between each of them. You can compress it as follows:

$ bzip2 file1 file2 file3 /student/work

2. We are going to use zip for compression. By using the zip compression tool, files are compressed...