In this how-to, we will look at how to work with tar archives via the terminal, including two of the most popular compression methods to squeeze every last byte of space.

Here, we use only the --create option with Tar. The lack of a destination causes Tar to send the archive data to standard output, which is then piped to the sdc compressor program.

There are a number of tools that you use to compress files on Linux systems, but they don't all behave the same way or yield the same level of compression. In this post, we compare five of them.