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There are a number of tools that you use to compress files on Linux systems, but they don't all behave the same way or yield the same level of compression. In this post, we compare five of them.

Installing Zip Out of the box, most Linux distributions don't come with Zip installed. Instead, they default to the tar tool. Fortunately, Zip is really easy to install. Let me show you.

Tar is a common file format for archives in Linux- and Unix-based operating systems. These types of files are typically used to back up files and directories or to transfer files and programs over ...

It’s very simple. You should know this method doesn’t work with just .tar files. Instead, those files need to be compressed and end with either .gz, .xz, .zip, or .7z.

The free and open source software is something of a Swiss Army Knife utility, able to open ZIP, gzip, tar, and RAR files, along with a many others. You can also use its 7z file compression format.