Wikipedia agrees, gzip is better than zip: “gzip is not to be confused with the ZIP archive format, which also uses DEFLATE. The ZIP format can hold collections of files without an external archiver, but is less compact than compressed tarballs holding the same data, because it compresses files individually and cannot take advantage of redundancy between files (solid compression).”
‘cd’ is a commend to change the current directory you’re working in. If your files are stored in ~/Documents/Compress then enter ‘cd Documents/Compress’.
Welcome to Mac land then! Terminal is a fantastic place to be if you feel comfortable there. There is probably an application somewhere that would gzip files for you with a nice GUI but that would take more effort and not teach you some useful stuff.
Ooh, quick tip: you can press Tab to complete directory or file names, i.e. ‘Doc’ > Press Tab > Completes it to ‘Documents’. Works for files in current directory but also nests: ‘Doc’ > Tab > ‘Documents’ > Add ’/Com’ > Press Tab > ‘Documents/Compress’
If u don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading another software to compress just right click on the file or folder and click on compress file and the OS will do it for u
@dexinsf Thanks, but I tried that, and it didn’t compress the file at all; it just put it in a zip. I need to make the file size actually smaller, to actually compress the file size.
@johanspun I’m a visual learner, so could you show me what I need to type if my file was in the Movies folder in my Home? I was thinking ‘cd Movies/Goldeneye’ but when I put the file name in, it says there was a syntax error.
@nashish Think of the current directory as a Finder window you have open. If you want to do something to a file, you have to navigate to the folder it’s in first (‘cd Movies’) then perform the action on the file (‘gzip Goldeneye.avi’).
@johanspun And if the file was nested in another folder, my first command would be ‘cd Movies/Goldeneye’ then I would type ‘gzip Goldeneye.avi’. Correct?
When you get a prompt back. So far, any time you’ve typed something there should be a line of the left, something along the lines of ‘username$ ’ possibly with some stuff in front of it. When that appears, the command is complete.
Ah ha! It’s still running then. Thanks again… Let’s hope the file size is smaller than the original. I’d hate to get the same result as the normal Mac OS X “Compress” command.