Use the following command to compress an entire directory or a single file on Linux. It’ll also compress every other directory inside a directory you specify–in other words, it works recursively.

tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file

Here’s what those switches actually mean:

• -c: Create an archive.
• -z: Compress the archive with gzip.
• -v: Display progress in the terminal while creating the archive, also known as “verbose” mode. The v is always optional in these commands, but it’s helpful.
• -f: Allows you to specify the filename of the archive.

Let’s say you have a directory named “stuff” in the current directory and you want to save it to a file named archive.tar.gz. You’d run the following command:

tar -czvf archive.tar.gz stuff

Or, let’s say there’s a directory at /usr/local/something on the current system and you want to compress it to a file named archive.tar.gz. You’d run the following command:

tar -czvf archive.tar.gz /usr/local/something