If you’re new to Linux and intent on peering under the hood a bit to see what makes things work, then you’ve probably encountered a range of files which are compressed in various formats. This guide is meant to be a quick and easy way to distinguish what’s what in compressed files. It’s written on and for Ubuntu but will be very useful for other distributions as well.

.gz, .tar.gz, .bz2, .zip – these are all files that have been compressed in one form or another. Compressed? There’s a real good technical explanation for what compression is and how the varying utilities achieve their end goal, but we’re not going to go into this here. Suffice it to say that compressing something is squishing it down to a smaller size so that it can be more easily stored or transported about. Uncompressing is doing the opposite so that we end up with the original, full sized file in the end.

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An introduction to Linux compression or what the heck is a tar.gz file?

Originally from ArsGeek by arsgeek

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