Tests the integrity of the zip file to ensure it is valid. Lists the contents of the zip file without extracting it. Encrypting data: Zip files support encryption, allowing users to protect sensitive data by encrypting it before adding it to a zip archive.Installing software: Some software applications are distributed as zip files, which must be unzipped before being installed and used.

Backing up data: Zip files can be used to create backups of important data, allowing users to restore their files in the event of data loss.

Organizing files: Zip files can be used to organize and group related files together, making it easier to manage large numbers of files.

Protecting files: Zip files can be password-protected to prevent unauthorized access to their data.

Reducing file size: Compressing files into a zip archive can reduce their size, making it easier to store them on a hard drive or send them via email.

Sharing files: Zip files are commonly used to share large numbers of files, such as photos or documents, over the internet.

This tutorial will show you how to use these commands to manage your files. Zip and unzip are two commonly used commands in Linux for compressing and archiving files.

How to create a zip file with a password.

How to update zip files (add new or update existing).

How to remove individual files from a.

But tar archives are more flexible, which is why I prefer them whenever I have a choice. Since pipelines (and thus the notion of streaming data from one process to another) only really exist in the Unix world, the main advantare of tar archives is lost on other systems, which is why Zip archives are much more popular there. But once I do have the entire file at hand, extracting partial contents from it will be much quicker from a tar file.īoth formats have one very strong point going for them, depending on where and how they are used. For a Zip archive, I have to wait until the archive directory appears, which comes at the very end of the archive. I can download a large tar archive and start extracting it right from the start, as soon as the first few blocks come in (and maybe interrupt the download as soon as I get the file I am looking for). With zip archives, there is always the need to have the entire file at hand to do anything useful with it, whereas a tar archive can be streamed to a pipeline. This may sound like a trivial difference, but in fact represents a polar opposite in philosophy. In the worst case, you'd need slightly more blocks until you can start extracting. Compression is applied on top of that each of the various compression programs that are applied to tar archives ( compress, gzip, bzip2 etc.) are stream compressors and don't alter the sequential nature of the archive in any matter. Tar archives are intended to be read in one fell swoop if only a single file is to be extracted, the archive is read sequentially, starting from the very beginning until the requested file is found (which may as well be at the very end).

There is no central directory instead, the archive contains header blocks at regular intervals which indicate which files will follow in the next few blocks. Tar archives were devised for bundling backups to be used for tape drives, hence for sequential access. Much like most web sites bundle their downloads even today, for the same reasons. Zip archives were created for BBS use, where it was important to be able to bundle the contents of a directory into one single (and compressed) file-instead of having to download possibly thousands of single files. In addition, the archive directory is vulnerable: If the archive gets truncated for some reason, it requires heavy wizardry to extract anything useful from the archive. However, this requires that the whole archive is accessible, and requires random access which is only available on block devices (floppy disks, hard drives). This allows to quickly extract single files without having to unpack the whole archive: Just read the archive directory and extract only what is needed. Zip archives contain a central directory of their contents at the end (most likely to avoid having to create the directory beforehand, where you don't yet know what will be inside).

Linux untar zip file