L in u X ba sics for h acke rs g e t t I n g s t a r t e d w I t h

Compressing Files
Now we have one archived file, but that file is bigger than the sum of the 
original files. What if you want to compress those files for ease of transport? 
Linux has several commands capable of creating compressed files. We will 
look at these:
•
gzip
, which uses the extension .tar.gz or .tgz
•
bzip2
, which uses the extension .tar.bz2
•
compress
, which uses the extension .tar.z
These all are capable of compressing our files, but they use different 
compression algorithms and have different compression ratios. Therefore, 
we’ll look at each one and what it’s capable of.
In general, 
compress
is the fastest, but the resultant files are larger; 
bzip2
is the slowest, but the resultant files are the smallest; and 
gzip
falls some-
where in between. The main reason you, as a budding hacker, should know 
all three methods is that when accessing other tools, you will run into vari-
ous types of compression. Therefore, this section shows you how to deal 
with the main methods of compression.
Compressing with gzip
Let’s try 
gzip
(GNU zip) first, as it is the most commonly used compression 
utility in Linux. You can compress your HackersArise.tar file by entering the 
following (making sure you’re in the directory that holds the archived file):
kali >gzip HackersArise.*
Notice that we used the wildcard 
*
for the file extension; this tells Linux 
that the command should apply to any file that begins with HackersArise with 
any file extension. You will use similar notation for the following examples. 
When we do a long listing on the directory, we can see that HackersArise.tar
has been replaced by HackersArise.tar.gz, and the file size has been com-
pressed to just 3,299 bytes!
kali >ls -l
--snip--
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3299 Nov 27 2018 13:32 HackersArise.tar.gz
--snip--
We can then decompress that same file by using the 
gunzip
command, 
short for GNU unzip.

---

Compressing and Archiving