Summary

In this lesson we covered how to archive and compress files and other data on your Unix system. This wraps up the file management portion of this book. In our next lesson, we will start to learn more about your shell, and in particular, the processes running on your Unix system. Here's a look at what was learned in this lesson:

• The three common compression utilities on Unix systems are the omnipresent compress, the newer and smarter gzip, and the cross-platform zip programs. A relatively new addition to the Unix compression scene is bzip2, which appears to produce better compression than compress or gzip.

• When you need to provide a collection of files to other users, or simply archive a set of files for future use, you can use tar to create tar files that contain all your files in one convenient package.

• If you need to send a file to someone through email, you can create an email-able encoding of the file by using the uuencode command.

• Don't be alarmed if you uudecode a file and can't immediately find it. The real filename is stored in plain text at the beginning of the file.