How To Compress and Extract Files Using SSH

Sometimes you may need to extract or create an archive file on your Linux server. The very first step in the process would be to identify the exact archive type by looking at the file extension. The most common archive types are zip (ending with .zip), tar (.tar), Tar+Gunzip (.tar.gz), Bzip (.bz2) and Rar (.rar).

Each archive type has its own command for compressing/extracting as listed below.

To extract a ZIP file, please use:

unzip archive.zip

To extract a Tar file, please use:

tar -xvf archive.tar

To extract a Tar.Gz file, please use:

tar -zxvf archive.tar.gz

To extract a Rar file, please use:

rar x archive.rar

 
Each archive type has its own mechanism to create a new archive file. The most commonly used is the tar.gz format. An example of creating such a file can be seen below:

To compress a file into the tar.gz format, please use:

tar -zcf archive-name.tar.gz foldername/