Packing and Unpacking Files

= Packing files = To pack means to unite several files in one file, called an archive. Practically the data can be compressed in the same step. There are two ways to del with compressed files:

1- GUI tools (with Graphical user interface):


 * Ark: default archive manager of KDE.
 * Archive Manager(Formerly known as File Roller): the default manager of GNOME.
 * Engrampa: the default archive manager of MATE desktop environment.
 * Xarchiver: the default archive manager of lightweight desktop environment like Xfce and LXDE
 * PeaZip: a cross-platform archive manager. In addition to Linux, this tool also supports other operating systems including Windows and macOS.

2- Command line tools and commands:

Typical commands for packing under Linux are Example: zip -r targetfile sourcedirectory Example (creates a .tar.gz file): tar cvzf targetfile.tar.gz sourcedirectory Example: bzip2 sourcefile
 * zip --  for .zip files
 * tar --  for .tar and .tar.gz files
 * bzip2 --  for .bz2 files

= Unpacking files = How to unpack files depends on their suffix: unpack with the command tar xvzf archive.tar.gz where archive is the archive's name without suffix unpack with the command tar xvf archive.tar where archive is the archive's name without suffix unpack with the command unzip archive.zip where archive is the archive's name without suffix unpack with the command bunzip2 archive.bz2 where archive is the archive's name without suffix unpack with the command unrar x archive.rar where archive is the archive's name without suffix
 * .tar.gz
 * .tar
 * .zip
 * .bz2
 * .rar

Many more archive formats exist. Most of them are recognized by

= See also =
 * LinuxIntro