Linux: Zip and 7Zip

scottalanmiller

Linux users often must work with files coming from, or going to, Windows users. Compressed Archive files are one of the more common files that need to be managed between the two platforms. Windows users often struggle to work with the Linux native compression formats (gzip, bzip2 and xz) unless they use a third party tool, such as 7Zip.

Linux has the tools to work with Windows' formats, however, so this task is quite simple. On Linux the very standard zip utility handles compatibility with standard Windows compression and archiving "zip" format and p7zip allows us to work with Compressed Archives in the common 7Zip format.

Let's say that we have a folder called stuff that contains things that we want to archive and compress together into a single Zip archive.

zip -r stuff.zip stuff

This will zip up the contents of stuff, the -r means recursive and is needed for the normal use case, and save it as stuff.zip. Now things can easily be sent to a Windows user. Notice that the zip utility does not replace the original folder. So, like with tar, you will use additional disk space for this operation.

Unzipping is even easier.

unzip stuff.zip

The p7zip utility is even easier. Let's take our stuff directory again and use the 7zip format.

p7zip stuff

That is all that we need. The command outputs stuff.7z. To decompress, though, we use a different format than with the other compression and archival commands.

p7zip -d stuff.7z

The -d flag is for decompress. Very easy to use as well. The Zip and 7Zip formats are not really suitable for use as UNIX utilities as they do not gather UNIX filesystem metadata. They are meant for use for transferring archives between systems where the metadata is not needed, such as from a UNIX system to Windows or vice versa.

Part of a series on Linux Systems Administration by Scott Alan Miller

Kelly

If you're working with only Linux would you keep using tar, or use one of the above commands?

scottalanmiller

@Kelly said in Linux: Zip and 7Zip:

If you're working with only Linux would you keep using tar, or use one of the above commands?

You would stay with tar. The tar utility maintains the UNIX filesystem metadata and is native to all platforms. The zip utility is commonly added to a Linux distro and 7zip lessso. But tar you will always have and it works better.

scottalanmiller

Using tar gives you often better compression, too. Or faster, depending on what you want.

tar -xzvf stuff.tgz /folder
tar -xjvf stuff.tgj /folder
tar -xJvf staff.tgx /folder

You can use those forms for gzip, bzip2 or xz compression options. All normally beat Windows Zip, xz is the same as 7zip, bzip2 is often the best option.

tonyshowoff

Sorry if this was mentioned but I didn't see it directly mentioned for clarity:

If your compression is unavailable directly in tar (-J being essentially 7zip, my favourite), you can tar it first (without compression) and then compress the tar, this maintains both Unix metadata and also gives the benefit.

Also, if you compress something already compressed you won't get the best benefit, at least not when it comes to using something as powerful as LZMA/7zip.

scottalanmiller

@tonyshowoff said in Linux: Zip and 7Zip:

Sorry if this was mentioned but I didn't see it directly mentioned for clarity:

If your compression is unavailable directly in tar (-J being essentially 7zip, my favourite), you can tar it first (without compression) and then compress the tar, this maintains both Unix metadata and also gives the benefit.

Also, if you compress something already compressed you won't get the best benefit, at least not when it comes to using something as powerful as LZMA/7zip.

I believe that that is mentioned in the tar article.