Ubuntu – Compress in .tgz

bashcompressiongziptar

I want to compress files in .tgz. I know how to make tar.gz(with tar and gzip) and some people say it is almost the same, but I need to make a .tgz, how??

Best Answer

A tar.gz file and a .tgz file are similar.

Compress files using tar:

tar -cvzf <name of tarball>.tgz /path/to/source/folder

for example, I want to create a backup.tgz or backup.tar.gz from folder /home/user/project

tar -cvzf backup.tgz /home/user/project

tar -cvzf backup.tar.gz /home/user/project

You can use tar cvzf instead of tar -cvzf as well.

Extract .tgz or .tar.gz files using tar

tar -xvzf backup.tgz

tar -xvzf backup.tar.gz

Mnemonic for compression (the order of the flags do not matter)

C ompress
Z ee
F ile
V erbose

Mnemonic for extraction (the order of the flags do not matter)

e X tract
Z ee
F ile
V erbose

Related Solutions

Compression – How to Compress a Directory

Well, most probably your files are perfectly fine before FTP transmission.

Unfortunately, probably you are transferring your files using wrong FTP mode.

FTP do have two modes: binary and ASCII. By default most clients use ASCII mode, which breaks your binary files completely. I don't know which FTP client you are using, but for example in ncftp you can use command "binary" to switch to binary mode.

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

On related note, you should know that FTP is insecure transmission protocol. Consider switching to sftp, for example. There is many free ssh servers for Windows, including minimal OpenSSH port.

Ubuntu – gzip 2 files into one file

Unlike ZIP, RAR or 7-Zip, for example, gzip can only compress one file. As you’ve already noted, there is the tar program which can serialize multiple files into one which makes them ready for gzip. The traditional Unix philosophy prefers to use multiple simpler and more specialized tools than one monolithic and complicated. In this case, it results in using tar and gzip consecutively, resulting in a .tar.gz (or .tgz) file.

However, GNU tar includes the -z option which compresses the result of the traditional tar using gzip in just one command.

.tar.gz files are mostly created using the -czvf options:

create a new archive
gzip (alternatives: j for bzip2, J for xz)
verbose (list processed files; optional)
output file (the following argument specifies the output file)

In your example, you can use the command:

tar -czvf test.tar.gz file.mp4 bar.txt

Is there any way to watch inner files without decompression with gzip or bzip2?

Yes, your command also works for a .tar.gz file:

tar -tvf test.tar.gz

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Compression – How to Compress a Directory

Ubuntu – gzip 2 files into one file

Further reading

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