{"id":8265,"date":"2019-01-17T10:22:04","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T10:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/?p=8265"},"modified":"2019-03-08T21:57:25","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T21:57:25","slug":"zipping-files-on-linux-the-many-variations-and-how-to-use-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2019\/01\/17\/zipping-files-on-linux-the-many-variations-and-how-to-use-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Zipping files on Linux: the many variations and how to use them"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are quite a few interesting things that you can do with “zip” commands other than compress and uncompress files. Here are some other zip options and how they can help.<\/h3>\n
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\"how<\/figure>\n
Some of us have been zipping files on Unix and Linux systems for many decades \u2014 to save some disk space and package files together for archiving. Even so, there are some interesting variations on zipping that not all of us have tried. So, in this post, we\u2019re going to look at standard zipping and unzipping as well as some other interesting zipping options.<\/span><\/figure>\n

The basic zip command<\/h2>\n

First, let\u2019s look at the basic\u00a0zip<\/strong>\u00a0command. It uses what is essentially the same compression algorithm as\u00a0gzip<\/strong>, but there are a couple important differences. For one thing, the gzip command is used only for compressing a single file where zip can both compress files and join them together into an archive. For another, the gzip command zips \u201cin place\u201d. In other words, it leaves a compressed file \u2014 not the original file alongside the compressed copy. Here’s an example of gzip at work:<\/p>\n

$ gzip onefile\r\n$ ls -l\r\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 10514 Jan 15 13:13 onefile.gz\r\n<\/pre>\n
And here’s zip. Notice how this command requires that a name be provided for the zipped archive where gzip simply uses the original file name and adds the .gz extension.<\/p>\n
$ zip twofiles.zip file*\r\n  adding: file1 (deflated 82%)\r\n  adding: file2 (deflated 82%)\r\n$ ls -l\r\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 58021 Jan 15 13:25 file1\r\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 58933 Jan 15 13:34 file2\r\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 21289 Jan 15 13:35 twofiles.zip\r\n<\/pre>\n
Notice also that the original files are still sitting there.<\/p>\n
The amount of disk space that is saved (i.e., the degree of compression obtained) will depend on the content of each file. The variation in the example below is considerable.<\/p>\n
$ zip mybin.zip ~\/bin\/*\r\n  adding: bin\/1 (deflated 26%)\r\n  adding: bin\/append (deflated 64%)\r\n  adding: bin\/BoD_meeting (deflated 18%)\r\n  adding: bin\/cpuhog1 (deflated 14%)\r\n  adding: bin\/cpuhog2 (stored 0%)\r\n  adding: bin\/ff (deflated 32%)\r\n  adding: bin\/file.0 (deflated 1%)\r\n  adding: bin\/loop (deflated 14%)\r\n  adding: bin\/notes (deflated 23%)\r\n  adding: bin\/patterns (stored 0%)\r\n  adding: bin\/runme (stored 0%)\r\n  adding: bin\/tryme (deflated 13%)\r\n  adding: bin\/tt (deflated 6%)\r\n<\/pre>\n
The unzip command<\/h2>\n
The\u00a0unzip<\/strong>\u00a0command will recover the contents from a zip file and, as you’d likely suspect, leave the zip file intact, whereas a similar gunzip command would leave only the uncompressed file.<\/p>\n