Sometimes file compression on terminal is kind of confusing because all of the tools and they have different command so it is hard to rememberthem. In this post I will summarize them. So if you want to do some compressing and stuff you can refer to this blog as reference.

Easy Way

Almost everyone have this in their .bashrc or .zshrc, but if you don’t know about this script it would make your life 100x easier. Just put this in the files mentioned earlier.

extract () {
   if [ -f $1 ] ; then
       case $1 in
           *.tar.bz2)   tar xvjf $1    ;;
           *.tar.gz)    tar xvzf $1    ;;
           *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1     ;;
           *.rar)       unrar x $1     ;;
           *.gz)        gunzip $1      ;;
           *.tar)       tar xvf $1     ;;
           *.tbz2)      tar xvjf $1    ;;
           *.tgz)       tar xvzf $1    ;;
           *.zip)       unzip $1   ;;
           *.Z)         uncompress $1  ;;
           *.7z)        7z x $1    ;;
           *)           echo "don't know how to extract '$1'..." ;;
       esac
   else
       echo "'$1' is not a valid file!"
   fi
}

After you put this in your .bashrc or .zshrc then just do extract <filename> and the file will be extracted :)

Zip

Extracting a Single Zip File
unzip <filename>

Extracting a lot of Zip Files
unzip '*.zip'

List Stuff Inside a Single Zip File
zipinfo -1 <filename>
Note: That’s number 1, not letter l or letter i. Several fonts has similar glyphs for these letters so pay attention to them.

List Stuff Inside a lot of Zip Files
unzip -l '*.zip'

Note: Notice the quotation mark surrounding the *.zip. The command will not work without it because unzip supported it’s own internal globbing so you can just use it instead of creating for loop. You can escape the asterisk too like so unzip -l \*.zi.

Deleting a File from a Single Zip File
Use this when you, for example, want to delete readme.txt from a single zip file.
zip -d <filename> "readme.txt"

Deleting a File from a lot of Zip Files
I got 100 zip files with readme.txt inside several of them. It is painful to check them one by one and then delete them. I use this command to delete all readme.txt inside zip file that has them. If they don’t have it then the script will spew an error but your zip files intact.
for i in *.zip; do zip -d $i "readme.txt"; done

Archiving a Single Zip File
zip <filename> <targetfile>
Note: Unlike a lot of other software, when you use zip the target file is last. So you give the zip file name first then you put the file you want to be archived last.
Example: zip MyGame.zip *.exe This will archive all *.exe in the folder into MyGame.zip

Archiving a lot of Files into Their Own Zip Files
Use this if you want to archive each of them individually, so one.exe and two.exe will become one.zip and two.zip, both of them will not be archived together in the same file.
for i in *.exe; do zip $i.zip $i;done

Conclusion

That’s it for now. I add this article because yesterday I was doing a lot of dirty zipping files so if I summarize those 1 hour of googling it might help you all :) until next post!