From LQWiki

ComPressing Files

• 7za- archives and compress files using p7zip (POSIX port of 7-Zip), an open-source program with very high compression rates
• bzip2- Compress the specified filename (better compression than gzip, but not as good as 7-zip)
• compress- Compresses the specified filename using the LZW compression algorithm.
• gzexe- Compresses the specified executable command. The specified file automatically decompresses and executes when you run it.
• gzip- Compresses the specified file using the LZ77 compression algorithm.
• rar- Commercial compression suite with very high compression rates
• zip - (Info-ZIP) - a PKZip-compatible compression suite
• zforce- Adds the .gz extension to all the files in the working deirectory or to the specified filename that was compressed using gzip. This utility prevents gzip from compressing files twice.
• znew - Recompress the specified filename, which must be a compressed file created with the compress utility, using the gzip format.

Note: While tar does no compressing, it is frequently used in conjunction with compression programs and even incorporates them into its options. For example, tar xzf file extracts gzip-compressed tarballs and tar xjf file (not on older versions of tar) extracts bzip2-compressed tarballs.

Extracting Files

This page is a list of various command line tools for uncompressing files in Linux, and provides example invocations.

• bunzip2 (.bz2)- Decompresses the specified filename

        bunzip2 filename.bz2

• cabextract (.cab)- Extracts files from Microsoft cabinet archives

        cabextract filename.cab

• uncompress- Decompresses the compress compressed file.

        uncompress filename

• gunzip (.gz)- This utility can decompress files created with the following utilities: compress, gzip and zip

        gunzip filename.gz

• lha (.lha) - LZH un-archiver

        lha x filename.lha

• tar (.tar) - This command is what is typically used to compress and decompress files in linux. It is typically called in one of the following forms:

        tar xvf filename.tar
        tar xvzf filename.tar.gz
        tar xvjf filename.tar.bz2

• unace (.ace)- Decompresses ace files

        unace x filename.ace

• unarj (.arj)- Decompresses or lists the content of the specified ARJ archive.

        unarj e filename.arj

• unrar (.rar)- Decompresses rar files

        unrar x filename.rar

• unzip (.zip)- Decompresses and extracts files created by the Linux zip utility, PKZIP(MS-DOS) or WinZip(Microsoft Windows).

        unzip filename.zip

• zoo (.zoo) - ZOO un-archiver

        zoo -extract ``filename.zoo

• cpio (.cpio) - copy files to and from archives

        cpio -idmv < filename.cpio

See also

• Archive