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First, a little background. In Unix, compressing (making something smaller) and archiving (combining many things into one) are two different functions. Also, a .tgz file is the same as a .tar.gz file, and a .tbz is the same as a .tar.bz2 file. The most commonly asked question about compression type programs   Why 4 different compression programs? Compress is the standard legacy Unix compression program. gzip has been around for 2 generations of Unix users, it compresses better thancompress, and everyone loves it. Then someone has to do better and create bzip2, which has significantly better compression ratios. However, bzip2 takes longer to work, and can be really slow on large files. And of course, zip is just for compatibility with windows users.   Decompressing Files   How do I decompress a .tar type file? tar xf file.tar How do I decompress a .gz type file? gunzip file.gz
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First, a little background.  In Unix, compressing (making something smaller) and archiving (combining many things into one) are two different functions. Also, a .tgz file is the same as a .tar.gz file, and a .tbz is the same as a .tar.bz2 file. Archiving: Question: How do I untar foo.tar? Answer: tar x -f foo.tar  (x is for extract, f is for filename) (more…)
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