To begin putting your skills to work accomplishing tasks and solving problems on the system.

To successfully accomplish/perform this project, the listed resources/experiences need to be consulted/achieved:

• ability to read the manual pages and use the information therein
• ability to copy, move, list, remove, and/or link files
• ability to navigate around the filesystem

When we talk about archives, there are commonly two separate actions taking place. Sometimes they are intertwined, others they represent discrete steps.

They are:

• archiving / extracting
• compression / decompression

Archives are merely a manifestation of a common computing concept: a container.

Containers encapsulate things; in this case- files. And the fact that UNIX tries to make everything a file really enhances the viability of this ability.

Compression, on the other hand, is an action performed on a single file. Utilizing various algorithms, we accomplish a sort of “more in less”… we can take the data present and cram it into a smaller box (file)… where the aim is to take up less storage on the filesystem (also makes copying easier).

There are many compression algorithms in existence. There are commonly two categories of compression algorithm:

• lossless - no data is lost as a part of the compression process
• lossy - unnecessary data is discarded as part of the compression process

Wikipedia has categories identifying various algorithms implemented for both lossless and lossy compression algorithms.

Where confusion may set in is when a tool combines the actions of archival AND compression. But if you think about it, even in such cases, we always end up with one file, and that file is compressed (unless we have a concatenation of separately compressed files into a single file.

Archives are useful in that they let us pack items together. If something needs 100 files, making a copy of that, or copying it/install it onto another system would be made more complex if we had to deal with each of those files individually. Archives simplify the problem in that they can provide us all those files, all contained within a single file (lessening opportunities for error). So, archives make our lives easier.

COMING SOON

Be sure to provide any commentary on your opus regarding realizations had and discoveries made during your pursuit of this project.

• Why do you suppose tar works the way it does?
• What might be some benefits of separating archival and compression functionality?

To successfully complete this project, the following criteria must be met:

• Submit a copy of your archive to me using the submit tool.

To submit this program to me using the submit tool, run the following command at your lab46 prompt:

$ submit unix archives myarchive.tar.gz 
Submitting unix project "archives":
    -> myarchive.tar.gz(OK)

SUCCESSFULLY SUBMITTED

You should get some sort of confirmation indicating successful submission if all went according to plan. If not, check for typos and or locational mismatches.