The only thing that’s really hard about extracting from archives on Unix systems is remembering all of the commands and the required options. When you have ten or more possible archive types and could ...

A core part of the philosophy of Unix-like operating systems is for tools to be specialised – each tool should do one job and do it well. That means we need a way to chain programs together to achieve ...

There are a number of tools that you use to compress files on Linux systems, but they don't all behave the same way or yield the same level of compression. In this post, we compare five of them. There ...

One of the most common programs on Linux systems for packaging files is the venerable tar. tar is short for tape archive, and originally, it would archive your files to a tape device. Now, you're more ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

In the world of Linux, file compression is a routine yet critical task, serving the dual purpose of saving disk space and speeding up file transfers. With several compression tools at your disposal, ...

There are two types of compression: lossless and lossy. Lossy compression achieves a greater reduction in file sizes by carefully discarding data that doesn't greatly affect the results. JPEG and MP3 ...