ARCHIVING COMMANDS IN THE LINUX ENVIRONMENT

On Linux systems, the interactive archiving command par excellence is the GNU Project's version of the tar utility, a longtime mainstay on UNIX systems. Short for "tape archiver," tar is capable of creating archives on disk drives as well as tape backup units.

An additional archive utility called cpio is included with most Linux distributions. Because this command reads from the standard input and writes to the standard output by default, it is better suited to use within scripts (in contrast to tar, which reads and writes to files by default and is therefore more convenient to use as an interactive command).

The zip utility gives Linux users the ability to exchange data with users of the most popular MS-DOS compression/archiving utility, PKZIP, and its Windows counterpart, WinZip. Typically included with Linux
distributions are additional, related commands, which may prove useful in certain situations. The zipinfo command displays information about the files stored in a zip archive. The zipnote command enables you to edit the comments appended to a zip archive. The zipsplit command enables you to divide a zip archive into segments small enough to fit on removable media, such as floppy disks or Zip disks.