Linux bzip2 Command- unix Zip, Compress File Tutorial, cmd Example

Tutorials

Linux-commands

Topic

What is Linux bzip2 Command?

Explanation

bzip2 COMMAND:
     bzip2 linux command is used to compress the file. Each file is replaced by a compressed version of itself with .bz2 extension.

SYNTAX:
  The Syntax is
     bzip2 [ options ] filenames

OPTIONS:

- c	Compress or decompress to standard output.
- d	Force decompression.
- z	The complement to -d. Force compression.
- t	Performs the integrity test. It performs a trial decompression test and prints the result.
- f	Force overwrite of output file.
- k	Keep the original file. dont delete the input file during compression or decompression.
- q	Quiet, suppress non-essential warning messages.
- s	Reduce memory usage, for compression,decompression and testing.
- v	verbose mode shows the compression ratio for each file processed.
- V	Displays the version of the software.
- L	Displays the license terms and conditions.
- 1	Performs fast compression,creating a relatively large files.
- 9	Get the best possible compression.

EXAMPLE:

To Compress a file using bzip2:

Lets have a text file as an example.


$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r--  1 hiox hiox 9150000 Sep 26 18:37 hiox.txt

$ bzip2 -c -1 hiox.txt > hiox.txt.bz2
$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r--  1 hiox hiox 9150000 Sep 26 18:37 hiox.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 hiox hiox   17706 Sep 27 12:38 hiox.txt.bz2

From the above example it is clear that the filesize is reduced from 9150000 bytes to 17706.

When the File is reduced with option -9 the filesize still gets reduced.


$ bzip2 -c -9 hiox.txt > hscripts.txt.bz2

$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r--  1 hiox hiox 9150000 Sep 26 18:37 hiox.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 hiox hiox   17706 Sep 27 12:38 hiox.txt.bz2
-rw-rw-r--  1 hiox hiox    2394 Sep 27 13:01 hscripts.txt.bz2

When the file is compressed with -1 the size was 17706 bytes and now the filesize is 2394 bytes. The 9 makes best compression but the default is 6.

bzip2 Linux Commands