How do I compress a directory?

compress.txt

If you want to create ZIP files using Ubuntu (or almost any other Linux), use zip. You can install it to Ubuntu by running

sudo apt-get install zip
Then you can create zip file by running

zip -r compressed_filename.zip foldername

If you want to use "zip" for .zip extentension you can see manual of zip. The commandline for using tar is:

tar cvzf tarball.tar.gz directory/


tar -xvzf community_images.tar.gz

To explain a little further, tar collected all the files into one package, community_images.tar. The gzip program applied compression, hence the gz extension. So the command does a couple things:

    f: this must be the last flag of the command, and the tar file must be immediately after. It tells tar the name and path of the compressed file.
    z: tells tar to decompress the archive using gzip
    x: tar can collect files or extract them. x does the latter.
    v: makes tar talk a lot. Verbose output shows you all the files being extracted.

If you want the files to be extracted to a particular destination you can add -C /destination/path/

Example:

tar xf community_images.tar.gz -C /home/emmys/Pictures/Community/

You can easily memorize it if you consider telling tar to e X tract a F ile