Maintaining your Linux OS
Overview
Basic
management
Passwords
Checking
storage space
Checking
processes
Managing
users
Shutting down
and restarting your computer
Automating
tasks
Linux file management
File compression and
archiving tools
File managers
File
splitters
Linux networking
Getting
started
MAC and IP
addresses
Domain names
Adding a Linux
host to an existing network
Building a
private network
Configuring the network
interface
Security
Uninstalling Linux
Summary
|
File compression and archiving tools
Files and file hierarchies which are no longer in use, but are
nonetheless still required, can be compressed or archived. This can
reduce the amount of disk space they occupy by as much as 60 to
70%. Compression and archiving are not only convenient ways of
optimising disk usage, but also of storing and creating back-ups of
important data and system files. There are a number of tools for
compressing and archiving files. These can be broadly categorised
as those which can be run from a console window and those which can
be run through a graphical user interface. Console-based tools
suitable for Linux file management include the following:
-
compress - a utility that attempts to reduce a file
using a lossless data compression algorithm. The
compressed file (identified by the .Z extension)
replaces the original, while the ownership modes and the change and
modification times remain the same. The amount of compression
depends on the type and size of the input file; for a typical text
file it is of the order of 50 to 60%.
-
gzip - is a compression utility designed to replace
the compress command. The main advantages of
gzip over compress are the better
compression ratio and the freedom from patented algorithms.
gzip produces compressed output files which can be
identified by the .gz extension. To uncompress the
.gz file, the command gunzip is used.
gzip may not have been included in your Linux
installation and if this is the case, then the utility can be
downloaded free of charge from www.gzip.org.
-
tar - archives and extracts files to and from a
single file called a tarfile. Common operations include
tar -cvf resultsfile *
which archives all the files in the current and any nested
subdirectories, and
tar -xvf resultsfile
which retrieves these files while maintaining the original
directory structure.
There are a large number of file compression and archiving
desktop tools. The (current) pick of the pack include:
-
Karchiver - a KDE-based utility which allows you to create
.Z, .gz, and .tar files via
a graphical user interface.
-
StuffIt - a tool that provides support for nearly all possible
archive formats including those created by the Windows and
Macintosh operating systems. StuffIt claims to produce the smallest
files of any compression program; if you would like to test this
claim then the toolkit can be found at www.stuffit.com.
-
RAR - is a Linux (and Windows) archiving utility that contains a
powerful compression algorithm. The tool is particularly good for
the compression of multimedia data but it can also be used to
create self-extracting archives and recover damaged archives. It
can be downloaded from www.rarlab.com.
|