It is very easy to compress a Whole Linux directory. It is useful to backup files. Technically, it is called as a compressed archive. GNU tar command is best for this work. It can be use on remote Linux server . It does two things for you:
=> Create the archive
=> Compress the archive
You need to use the tar command as follows (syntax of tar command):
tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name
Where,
-z : Compress archive using gzip program
-c: Create archive
-v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
-f: Archive File name
For example, say you have a directory called /home/ran/prog and you would like to compress this directory then you can type tar command as follows:
$ tar -zcvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz /home/ran/prog
Above command will create an archive file called prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz in current directory. If you wish to restore your archive then you need to use the following command (it will extract all files in current directory):
$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz
Where,
-x: Extract files
If you wish to extract files in particular directory, for example in /tmp then you need to use the following command:
$ tar -zxvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz -C /tmp
$ cd /tmp
$ ls -a
A note about non gnu/tar command
The above syntax use GNU tar command for compressing and uncompressing tar files. If your system does not use GNU tar, you can still create a compressed tar file, via the following syntax:
tar -cvf – file1 file2 dir3 | gzip > archive.tar.gz
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