Tips-And-Tricks/Computer/Linux/Shell-Commands

Linux is a growing and popular operating system, especially for us citizen mycologists, and unknown to a lot of first-time users, it has an extensive set of wonderful tools that can do things that are nearly black magic in Windows or even to the casual Macintosh user.

As a MacOS user, you too have access to most of these commands as well (surprisingly without having to pay an exhorberant fee to use them too!). Mac OS is based on an offshoot of the original AT&T Unix called BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), and as such has most of the core shell commands at your disposal.

File Compression / Extraction

There are two main compression utilities out there that can take a directory and compress it all into a single file, allowing you to move it to another computer, either in your home or on the internet, and then extract it there. Depending on the source or destination computer may make the decision as to the best.

zip/unzip - Compatible with Micro$oft Windows since Windows XP tar - Compatible with Linux, or any Unix-compatible operating system, including macOS.

zip/unzip

Compression

The zip command packs files into a zip archive, which can be read on the host machine pretty much universally. The general format is

zip [flags] destination[.zip] file list

Where the .zip extension is optional. To zip a list of files in the SAME directory, you can use

zip filename.zip file1 file2 file3 ...

To zip an entire directory structure you can use the "r" flag and it will descend through the whole structure adding everything found to the archive.

zip -r docs.zip Documents