I am trying to simply compress a directory using

tar -zcvf test.tar.gz /home/me/dir1

It creates the archive but it is the same exact size as the original directory, same thing when I try using zip -r archivefile1 .

What am I doing wrong?

What types of files are you trying to compress? You won't get much out of compressing a directory of MP3s, since the it's a compressed format. Text files and files of non-compressed formats should compress significantly.

Some pics and text files. They are not compressing at all. I check the file size of the original directory and its exactly the same as the one that is supposed to be compressed, its like the switch to compress is not working.
Ive read half a dozen websites that show the exact same way I am doing it.

I'd expect the text files to compress, but the pictures may or may not depending on their format. I know that JPEG, GIF and PNG are compressed formats, but I don't remember any of the uncompressed ones. TIFF uses a lossless compression algorithm, so it might compress a little but I'm not sure.

As a test, you could copy all of the text files to a separate directory to test if they compress.

Yea, ive been doing all kinds of tests like that. Thanks.

Thoughts:

A) You don't need the dash when invoking tar:

tar zcvf test.tar.gz /home/me/dir1

is sufficient. I don't think that the dash will do any harm, but try without, and see if that makes a difference; it might be affecting the z option, which does the compression. I can't replicate the problem even when I do use the dash.

B) Try 'file test.tar.gz'. If you get

Then you know that the file is in fact tarred and gzipped.

C) If you want to bring out the hammer and tongs, you might try

D) I believe that gzip does not compress when the file size of the compressed file is equal to or greater than the original file. This usually only happens on files which have already been compressed, and would be very unusual on uncompressed text files (typical compression on text files is around %90)

E) What happens when you use "tar Zcvf test.tar.bz2 /home/me/dir1" ?