Cross-platform file compression
Command Line – zip
© Photo by Alexander Ross on Unsplash
If you use file compression regularly, zip belongs in your Linux toolbox.
File compression in Linux is usually handled by the native commands tar, gzip, or bzip2. However, an additional alternative is zip [1], a popular cross-platform command supported by a variety of scripts and utilities. If you are dealing with someone using another operating system, zip is often the ideal choice among these compression tools.
Admittedly, on Linux, zip has fallen out of favor, because for a time it did not support 64-bit computing and could not handle files large than 2MB. Today, though, zip, gzip, and bzip2 are broadly similar in functionality and structure. All three have similar options, although not always the same name for every option. All three, too, have a history of providing alternate command names for some functions, such as unzip and ungzip, that duplicate standard options – presumably to make the commands easier to remember.
Despite these similarities, neither zip nor gzip recognizes the other's extensions, although both can use files created by the other if the extension is changed. zip can use the option --bzip to use bzip options, which can produce somewhat better compression rates, at least in theory, on binary files.
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