How to Compress and Extract Files and Directories in Linux Using gzip and bzip2

The post explains provides basic commands to compress files and folders in Linux OS. To compress a file or folder, gzip and bzip2 are two very popular tools.

Gzip Compression

To compress a file:

# gzip file1

A file by name file1.gz will be created in current directory replacing file1. You can compress multiple files in one go by just specifying their names, separated by spaces. For example:

# gzip file1 file2 file3

To expand a gzip compressed file in current directory:

# gunzip file1.gz

To compress a directory, you can create a tar and compress it.

# tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory

To compress multiple directories in one file:

# tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/directory1 /path/directory2

To extract the a “tar and compressed” directory in your current directory,

# tar -xzvf name-of-archive.tar.gz

To extract the a “tar and compressed” directory in a particular directory,

# tar -xzvf name-of-archive.tar.gz -C /path/to/directory

Bzip2 compression

To compress a file:

# bzip2 file1

A file by name file1.bz2 will be created in current directory replacing file1. Similar to gzip you can compress multiple files in one go. For example

# bzip2 file1 file2 file3

To expand a file in current directory:

# bunzip2 file1.bz2

To compress a directory, you can create a tar and compress it.

# tar -cjvf name-of-archive.tar.bz2 /path/to/directory

To compress multiple directories in one file:

# tar -cjvf name-of-archive.tar.bz2 /path/directory1 /path/directory2

To extract the a “tar and compressed” directory in your current directory,

# tar -xjvf name-of-archive.tar.bz2

To extract the a “tar and compressed” directory in a particular directory,

# tar -xjvf name-of-archive.tar.bz2 -C /path/to/directory