gzip -dc filename.tar.gz |tar -x
This sample command uncompresses a compressed "tar.gz" file. The first part of the command for gzip uncompresses the file, leaving you tar file. Tar files are a single file that contains multiple files (but uncompressed). The "|" pipes the uncompressed information to the tar program which unpacks it into multiple files. You should end up with a directory called "filename" with all the included files in it. Bzip2 uses a compatible decompress tag to gzip, so you can use bzip2 -dc ... in the above for a .tar.bz2 archive.
See the man pages (e.g. "man tar", "man gzip") for more information.
To archive and compress a folder:
From: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~ola/courses/programming/tar.html
It's often more useful to tar a directory (which tars all files and subdirectories recursively unless you specify otherwise). The nice part about tarring a directory is that it is untarred as a directory rather than as individual files.
tar cvzf foo.tgz cps100
tar unpack: tar -xvf file.tar
I think this will compress a file to a new file (i.e. no overwrite) in Windows Gzip:
gzip c:test.txt -c > c:temptest.gz
Linux
Compress a file, name will automatically be original name + ".gz": gzip file-to-be-compressed.txt
Decompress: gzip -d file-to-decompress.txt.gz
View a gzipped file (e.g. a log file that has been rotated and compressed):
gzip -dc /var/log/maillog.1.gz | cat
Or use grep on the file in the gzip:
gzip -dc /var/log/maillog.1.gz | grep me@example.com
Unzip a ".zip" file - it's actually a lot easier than I expected:
unzip [filename]
bzip2 -d water.tar.bz2
Tags: examples, extract, decompress, bzip2, tarball, gzip, grep,