Archiving Commands in Unix

November 19, 2025

Command Line

I'll introduce two commonly used archiving commands in Unix-like operating systems: zip and tar. These commands are essential for compressing files and directories, making it easier to store and transfer them.

Zip Command Syntax

zip [options] [filename.zip] [file_to_zip]

Options

Options	Description	Syntax
`-r`	Recursively zip a directory	`zip -r [filename.zip] [dir_name]`
`-x`	Explicitly exclude the specified files	`zip -r [filename.zip] [dir_name] -x [excluded_file]`
`-m`	Move the original files into the archive	`zip -m [filename.zip] [file_to_zip]`

Examples

Zipping files
```
zip archive.zip file1.txt file2.txt
```
Zipping a directory while excluding some subdirectories
```
zip -r archive.zip . -x "node_modules/*"
```
For a large number of exclusions, a file can be used to list the patterns.
```
zip -r archive.zip . -x @exclude.lst
```
In this case, exclude.lst would contain one pattern per line, and zip would exclude files matching those patterns.
Zipping files and moving them into the archive
```
zip -m documents.zip *.txt
```

Tar Command Syntax

tar [options] [archive_name.tar] [file_to_archive]

Options

The -f option is mandatory to specify the archive file name. Without it, tar will try to write this archive to the default output device (typically /dev/rmt0 or standard output)

Options	Description	Syntax
`-c`	Create a new archive	`tar -cf name.tar [targets...]`
`-z`	Compress with gzip	`tar -czf name.tar.gz [targets...]`
`-x`	Extract files	`tar -xf name.tar`
`-v`	Verbose output	`tar -xvf name.tar`
`-C`	Change to [dir] before performing operations	`tar -C [dir] -xzf name.tar.gz`

Combining options or skipping dash is common, e.g. tar Cxzf output_dir archive.tar.gz is the same as tar -C output_dir -xzf archive.tar.gz

Examples

Create a new .tar.gz archive

tar -czf archive.tar.gz file1.txt file2.txt

Extract a .tar.gz archive
```
tar -xzf archive.tar.gz
```
Or, extract specific files (file1.txt and file2.txt) from the archive:
```
tar -xzf archive.tar.gz file1.txt file2.txt
```

Browsing Archive Files

To browse the contents of a zip, tar, or tar.gz file using Vim or Neovim, you can simply open the them with either editor. These editors have built-in support for browsing zip archives.

# e.g.
vim filename.zip
nvim filename.tar.gz