gzip file compression in 100 Seconds

Gzip is a file compression tool and popular Linux utility used to make files smaller. Learn how file compression works in 100 seconds.

#linux #compsci #100SecondsOfCode

🔗 Resources

🔥 Get More Content - Upgrade to PRO

Use code lORhwXd2 for 25% off your first payment.

🎨 My Editor Settings

- Atom One Dark
- vscode-icons
- Fira Code Font

🔖 Topics Covered

- What is Gzip?
- How to create a tarball?
- What is end-to-end compression?
- Lossy vs Lossless file compression
- File compression algorithms history
- TAR vs Gzip

[MobiusCoin]

This is exactly what 100 Seconds is for. I'm never going to do a full course on gzip but it's nice to know what it's about.

[puito]

When I first got into linux all these words "tar", "gzip", "tarball" and their commands were a mystery which took me way longer than 100s to figure out. This video is gold for getting started. Putting all this in perspective in less than 2 minutes is just awesome.

[zatrox]

SO THAT'S WHAT THE TAR EXTENSION IS, was always curious about that whenever i had to do something in linux, but never actually searched it up

[sharpfang]

You're all lucky newer implementations of Tar stripped all the tape-related stuff. Reading through the man page you'd spend an hour to find how to create, or add to an archive, while in the process learning how to rewind the tape, seek the next archive on tape, activate a jukebox-like tape swapper mechanism, wipe a tape, check whether there's enough free space after the last archive to fit yours, switch to a different track on a multi-track tape, set tape drive rpm, and a myriad of others.

[kebien]

One interesting difference with zip is that in zip each file is compressed and then archived, whereas in tar.gz you archive all the files and then compress the whole thing.

Advantage: Cross-file compression (i.e. repeated patterns across files are used for compression)

Disadvantage: You can not extract a single file and leave the rest alone.

[sum]

This man is so considerate, he even included the -v flag (which for starters stands for verbose) just so you can see your files being compressed, truly a born teacher. Here's an explanation of the flags used by him:

-c = stands for create, it's the one you'd use the most.
-z = tells tar to compress using gzip. There's many other ones you can choose from, which imo gzip being the best.
-v = verbose, tells tar to display output in the terminal.
-f = stands for filename, usually a directory.

You can read most, if not all options using the --help command, with two hyphens.

Even if you use windows, using the terminal makes your life way faster if you get used to it. I highly recommend giving a shot to the lifestyle.

[Mutual_Information]

It’s refreshing when a video focuses on information density

[colton]

While an undeniably good developer, Jeff really shines with his ability to synthesize and condense down information. These videos are snappy, engaging, and eloquent. Thank you a million, Jeff.

[AshishKadam]

These 100 second videos are in a way gzipped version of all the knowledge acquired over a long time, isn't it? 🙂

[GiggityGlen]

Oh yeah, compression really played a hand when I implemented a redis caching in the backend. It significantly reduced memory usage and network traffic to cloud redis. And gzip is actually really fast too (we save string to redis as key val).

[augustday]

I had to write my own implementation of the Huffman encoding algorithm for a computer science class back in the day. Compression and data encoding is a really interesting subject! It's an interesting scientific problem to figure out how to represent lossless information in the last amount of bits possible.

[bloocifer]

tarballs sounded so intimidating to me and i thought it was something complicated lmfaoo i always wondered. its so freaking simple. i just made gzipped and gunzipped a couple files and then made a tarball out of them. shrank 250kb to 80kb. Cool stuff lol Just goes to show you how you can get in your own way sometimes. And also how good Fireships videos are.

[fabian.hertwig]

I love that your channel is pure information, no duplication. Perfect compression 👌🏼😌

[xorinzor]

I really love these kind of videos. Short & sweet. You really feel like you've learned some fundamental (and interesting!) things in a very short amount of time

[nitromegamer]

fireship your insane! im binging your entire videos like high quality paid courses and its actually helping me alot in my assignments, kudos

[joross]

Always enjoy content designed around re-enforcing the basics. Your 100 second format is a great way of presenting it.

[optymystyc]

“Ending in dot Jeezy” that took me out. Lol. You’re goated for that one 😂.

[TheDingsBoms]

These videos are so helpful and revealing for stuff I’ve always wondered about thank you!

[juice]

I usually use zstd (Zstandard) for files when the portability of gzip or zip is not required.
Also lz4 is pretty cool to use in applications because of its ultra-low compression and decompression overhead.

[AndrewSunada]

Nice! Super informative! Been doing this over 12 years and just this is a ton of news to me.