
You can easily unzip them by double clicking them and the file will automatically be decompressed. Now you downloaded zip files will be saved as zip files. (the section further says ‘safe’ files include movies, pictures, sounds, PDF and text documents, and archives.)

This one is macOSnative only – for a GUI interface use /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility – for command line use: To extract gunzip archivename.gz DMG – macOS Only To compress tar -jcvf archive_2 folder_to_compress To extract tar -zxvf archive_ TAR.BZ2 – Cross PlatformĪ variation on TAR GZ but with better compression than both tar.gz and zip. To compress tar -zcvf archive_ folder_to_compress Second up is TAR, an old favorite on Unix/Linux – you add the GZ for the compression – compresses tighter than zip ds store files, use the “-X” option in the command so: zip -r -X archive_name.zip folder_to_compress TAR.GZ – Cross Platform If you want to make a zip without those invisible Mac resource files such as “_MACOSX” or “._Filename” and. To compress zip -r archive_name.zip folder_to_compress ZIP – Cross Platformįirst up is ZIP one of the most commonly used compression techniques used across all platforms Here are some built-in compression applications you can use including zip, tar, gz, bz2, gz and dmg.


A compressed file which contains files and folders is generally referred to as an archive. The default command line application interface in macOS is the Terminal and is stored in /Applications/Utilities.įile and folder compression saves on file size and ensures the contents are captured and delivered or stored as one monolithic file. Since macOS is based on Unix there are a number of ways to compress files and folders within the filing system using Unix based application code, below are a few options using the Terminal or command line interface (cli).
