From the course: Ubuntu Linux: Essential Commands

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Compress and decompress files

Compress and decompress files

From the course: Ubuntu Linux: Essential Commands

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Compress and decompress files

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- [Instructor] Archives let us combine a lot of individual files into one larger file and compression gives us the opportunity to reduce the overall size of one or more files. Archives and file compression can sometimes be treated as the same thing. But here on Linux we need to, at least initially, think of them separately. An archive is not necessarily compressed. But it does take a bunch of files and combine them all into one file which can make it easier to store, transmit or keep track of. On Linux, the archive format we use most often is called TAR, short for Tape Archive. Originally this format was designed to take a number of files and store them in a way that makes sense for a tape drive to record the information onto a tape. A tape is linear, so seeking between different locations takes a lot more time as compared to hard drives or solid state memory. So the tape archive needed to have all of the information organized in a way that worked for that medium. A tape archive…

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