Disks and File Systems

Archiving packs multiple files and directories into a single file: tar -cf files file1 file2 gives me files.tar
Compressing is reducing the size: gzip file1 gives me file1.gz. gzip is for zipping, and gunzip is for unzipping. It is not gun-zip, it is g-unzip. It all makes a lot of sense now. 🤦
These generally go hand in hand, which is how we end up with .tar.gz files or .tgz.
If you want to view the contents of a file before extracting them, tar -tvf <filename>.tar.
To decompress and unarchive a file we do: tar -xvfz <filename>.tar.gz, where z is for zcat which is pretty muchgunzip with a couple flags.

Here's a blogpost from linuxhandbook explaining it. Highlights:

/etc is pronounced EHT-see, like the store and not et cetera. 🤦
/tmp is temporary files that get wiped, but /var/tmp isn't.
/opt is for additional third-party software. Not widely used, but the general practice is to symlink the binary from /opt to /bin.
/usr/local/include has the header files used by the C compiler.

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