There are several tools for compressing and decompressing files in Linux, you can get a summary of these tools in this link. Zip is one of the utilities used for packaging, compressing (archive) and decompressing files.

Installation

• Ubuntu

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sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zip unzip

• RedHat or CentOS

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sudo yum install unzip

Compress files

Compress files in a directory named tutorial –

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$ zip -r tutorial.zip tutorial/
   adding: tutorial/ (stored 0%)
   adding: tutorial/host.conf (deflated 13%)
   adding: tutorial/hostname (stored 0%)
   adding: tutorial/hosts.deny (deflated 44%)
   adding: tutorial/hosts (deflated 35%)
   adding: tutorial/hosts.allow (deflated 42%)
   adding: tutorial/auth_sa.py (deflated 52%)

View contents of zip files, without uncompressing –

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$ zip -sf tutorial
 Archive contains:
   tutorial/
   tutorial/host.conf
   tutorial/hostname
   tutorial/hosts.deny
   tutorial/hosts
   tutorial/hosts.allow
   tutorial/auth_sa.py
 Total 7 entries (2487 bytes)

Unzip or decompress

To decompress a zipped file, use the unzip command –

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$ unzip tutorial.zip
Archive:  tutorial.zip
   creating: tutorial/
  inflating: tutorial/host.conf
 extracting: tutorial/hostname
  inflating: tutorial/hosts.deny
  inflating: tutorial/hosts
  inflating: tutorial/hosts.allow
  inflating: tutorial/auth_sa.py

Search and compress

You can also combine find and zip command to search for certain types of files and compress those files in one command –

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$ find . -type f -name '*.conf' -print | zip confi-files -@
  adding: host.conf (deflated 13%)
  adding: colord.conf (deflated 50%)
  adding: ntp.conf (deflated 56%)
 
$ zip -sf confi-files
Archive contains:
  host.conf
  colord.conf
  ntp.conf
Total 3 entries (1858 bytes)

References -
https://linux.die.net/man/1/zip 

Contents of most text files change during the life of the file , and it is common to find yourself trying to search and replace certain text across multiple files. In Linux, this is a fairly easy task. Let us go through some of the commands you will need to perform this task and then finally construct a single liner to do the job.

• grep is your best friend when it comes to finding a string in a file. In this case we are looking for the string “REPLACEME” in current directory and across multiple files –

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$ grep -r REPLACEME *
host.conf:# The "REPLACEME" line is only used by old versions of the C library.
host.conf:order hosts,REPLACEME,bind
hostname:REPLACEME
hosts.deny:ALL: REPLACEME

If we are interested only in the files which contains this particular text –

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$ grep -lr REPLACEME *
host.conf
hostname
hosts.deny

• sed is a tool of choice for inline editing of files –

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$ cat data 
This text will be replaced - REPLACEME
$ sed -i 's/REPLACEME/NEWTEXT/g' data 
$ cat data 
This text will be replaced - NEWTEXT

From here, there are multiple ways to skin the cat – we can loop through the files and do the replacement or we can let the commands do the replacement with a wildcard.

For loop style update -

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$ for f in $(grep -lr REPLACEME *); do echo "*** File: ${f} ***" ; sed -i 's/REPLACEME/NEWTEXT/g' $f; done
*** File: host.conf ***
*** File: hostname ***
*** File: hosts.deny ***
 
$ grep -lr REPLACEME *
 
$ grep -lr NEWTEXT *
data
host.conf
hostname
hosts.deny

Actually the above for loop is redundant, sed can make changes across multiple files –

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sed -i 's/REPLACEME/NEWTEXT/g' *