Compression and Decompression of multiple files

[Alex Rice]

On Feb 7, 2004, at 10:39 AM, Rob Cozens wrote:

> The StuffIt tar archiver I use seems to do no compression...at least 
> compared to .sits, .seas, and Windows .zips.  Is that normal?  Is 
> there nothing better (at building a smaller archive from the same 
> files) available to the Unix community?

That's correct TAR does not do compression, it just does archiving. 
However GNU tar can pipe data through gzip, bzip, gunzip, bunzip, etc. 
So in practice, the tar *command* does do compression:

tar xvzf something.tar.gz # expand
tar cvzf something.tar.gz folder1 folder2 file3 ...  # compress


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Alex Rice | Mindlube Software | http://mindlube.com