Compressing files

First step is to tar the files together, c option is create, v is verbose, f means write the following file

tar -cvf TarName.tar filename.txt filename2.txt filename3.txt 

tar a directory of files

tar -cvf my_files.tar /path/to/my/directory

View whats in a tar file

tar -tvf TarName.tar

gzip files, the wildcars if for all extensions matching that name

gzip TarName.*

It will create a smaller file with the extension

TarName.tar.gz

To decompress a file

gunzip TarName.*

To move out from the tar extension

tar -xvf my_files.tar

To zip a directory

zip -r folder_name.zip folder_name 

To unzip a .zip file to same directory

unzip file_name.zip