Compression Terminal Tools

Data compression encodes information in fewer bits, either without loss so the original comes back byte for byte, or with loss for media where some detail can be discarded. On Unix systems it usually arrives as an archive built with tar and then squeezed with gzip, Zstandard or xz.

 

Terminal tools in this category create and extract those archives, often wrapping the older commands so one syntax handles every format. They list contents before extraction, show progress on large files, and spread the work across every core. Releases get shipped this way, logs get shrunk, and large directories move between machines with fewer bytes on the wire.

 

Below is a list of terminal tools for compressing and extracting files.