Compression Utilities

Compression utilities are a necessity in a Linux environment. Table A.12 contains a list of the main tools used in compression tasks.

Table A.12. Compression Utilities

COMMAND	GENERAL USAGE	DESCRIPTION
gzip	gzip FILE	Utility used to compress files. (Commonly used to compress tar archives.) Files compressed with gzip usually have a .gz extension.
gunzip	gunzip FILE.gz	Utility used to uncompress gzip files. (Same as gzip -d.)
bzip2	bzip2 FILE	Utility used to compress files. (Utilizes a different algorithm than gzip. Also used to compress tar archives.) Files compressed with bzip2 usually have a .bz2 extension.
bunzip2	bunzip2 FILE.bz2	Utility used to uncompress bzip2 files. (Same as bzip2 -d.)