Compress and extract files

With tar

On Unix based plattforms you can use the tar command for file compression and also for later uncompression.

$> tar -pczf web.tar.gz web/

With -h as the first parameter the real files instead symbolic links are compressed. So you can tar symbolic link targets.

To exclude files or folder, you can define –exclude=’fileOFolderPath’ directly after the tar command.

You can also pipe into tar like in the following example:

$> ls -lht | head -18 | awk '{print $9}'| xargs tar -pczf lastfiles.tar.gz --files-from -

This snippet takes the 18 most recent files and compresses them to a tar.gz file.

$> tar xvfz web.tar.gz

To untar (extract) to another folder you can use the -C option.

But you probably prefer to use the zip / unzip command like on Microsoft Windows.

$> zip -9 -r -X archive.zip folder_or_files_to_compress

-9 (n) => integer value that specifies the compression level (0 == no compression – 9 == maximum compression)
r => recursive
X => ignores invisible Mac resource files (bspw.: “_MACOSX”, “._Filename”, “.ds_store”)
o => override existing files
–symlinks => preserve the symlinks in the archive, so that after unpacking the filesystem, alle links work like before
>/dev/null => useful to silence the command (no output -> only errors)

$> unzip archive.zip