gzip

gzip   [ -acdfhlLnNrtvV19 ] [-S suffix] [ name ...  ]
gunzip [ -acfhlLnNrtvV ] [-S suffix] [ name ...  ]
zcat   [ -fhLV ] [ name ...  ]

gzip compresses files.

A good cross platform file compression tool.

Examples

Compress a file

$ gzip bigfile

Uncompress a file a file

$ gunzip bigfile.gz

Compress a full directory structure using tar

$ tar czvf mydir.tar.gz directory

Uncompress a full directory structure using tar. Note that the GNU version of tar automatically recognises that the archive is compressed.

$ tar xf directory.tar.gz