Compressing data with gzip

gzip is a commonly used compression format in the GNU/Linux platform. It is one of the utilities (such as gzip, gunzip, and zcat) that handle gzip compression. However, gzip can be applied only on a single file or data stream. This means that it cannot archive directories and multiple files. Hence, we must first create a tar archive and compress it with gzip. Let's see how to operate with gzip.

How to do it...

gzip can be used both to compress files and decompress them back to the original:

1. In order to compress a file with gzip use the following command:

   $ gzip filename
   $ ls
   filename.gz
   

2. Extract a gzip compressed file as follows:

   $ gunzip filename.gz
   $ ls
   file
   

3. In order to list out the properties of a compressed file use:

   $ gzip -l test.txt.gz
   compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
     35                   6 -33.3% test.txt
   

4. The gzip command can read a file from stdin and also write a compressed file into stdout.

   Read data from stdin and output the compressed...