gzip and bzip2

File compressors. Both compressors are similar. bzip2 has higher compression rate, but gzip is more popular/well-known.

e.g.

• Compress

  gzip -9 <FILE> bzip2 -9 <FILE>

  The compressed file will have .gz and .bz2 for gzip and bzip2 respectively. The parameter "-9" means compression ratio. It ranges from 1 to 9. with 1 the fastest but the lowest compression rate and 9 the slowest but the highest compression rate. The original file <FILE> will be removed.

• Decompress

  gunzip <FILE> bunzip2 <FILE>

  After decompression, the compressed file will be removed.

How:

Go to ~/gzip:

cd ~/gzip

• Compress

  gzip ./bigfile_g1

  gzip -9 ./bigfile_g9

  bzip2 ./bigfile_b1

  bzip2 -9 ./bigfile_b9

  Note their filenames and compare their file sizes:

  ls -l

  [yuni@lovely-linux gzip]\$ ls -l
  total 369
  drwx------    2 yuni     yuni          512 Jul 15 20:36 ./
  drwx--x--x  258 yuni     yuni        24576 Jul 15 20:08 ../
  -rw-------    1 yuni     yuni        86013 Jul 15 20:36 bigfile_b1.bz2
  -rw-------    1 yuni     yuni        83283 Jul 15 20:36 bigfile_b9.bz2
  -rw-------    1 yuni     yuni        90380 Jul 15 20:36 bigfile_g1.gz
  -rw-------    1 yuni     yuni        90095 Jul 15 20:36 bigfile_g9.gz

• Decompress

  gunzip bigfile_g1.gz

  bunzip2 bigfile_b9.bz2