bz and gz

sikandar · 08-23-2003, 09:39 AM

What is the difference between bz and gz. I downloaded files with these extenstion .tar.bz2 or .tar.gz etc.

How to unzip/untar both of these?

MasterC · 08-23-2003, 09:43 AM

.tar.gz = tar xvzf filename.tar.gz

.tar.bz2 = tar xvjf filename.tar.bz2

Bzip2 compressed files tend to be smaller, which is nice if you are on a slow connection. If you've got the bzip2 app installed, you should look for those as often as possible.

HTH

Cool

sikandar · 08-23-2003, 09:50 AM

So its mean both are tar files. and to untar bz2 I will have to give the following command,

tar -xjf filename.tar.bz2

Secondly I want to know that why we use "-" before xjf?

MasterC · 08-23-2003, 09:53 AM

You don't have to. It's a delimiter, or option, to the tar command. When giving options to applications, in linux, it's supplied as -options. This is likely to decipher between another command and options to the aforementioned command.

But with tar, you don't have to:
tar xvjf
will work just as:
tar -xvjf
does.

Both are tarballs that are further compressed with either gzip compression or bzip2.

Cool

Thetargos · 08-23-2003, 11:54 AM

To extend the MasterC comment on the subject:

the dash (-) is used more as a convention and for compatibility with other UNIXes and is the standard of POSIX OS's. On the other hand GNU supports long options as in --help (preceded with a double dash)

Cheers!