The standard archival program for Unix-like operating systems including Linux and Mac OS X is Tar, so called because Tar was originally used to store backups on tape drives (Tape ARchive).

There are a number of tools that you use to compress files on Linux systems, but they don't all behave the same way or yield the same level of compression. In this post, we compare five of them.

Jack Wallen walks you through the process of zipping and unzipping files in Linux from both the command line and the GUI.