[CentOS] Bzip2 Compress directories

Wed Apr 22 23:51:33 UTC 2009
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

Robert Heller wrote:

> Note that is also possible to use dump or cpio as well.  Unlike the
> MS-Windows zip/unzip, which combines compressing and archiving in a
> single program, the 'UNIX' way is to separate these functions.  bzip2
> only compresses.  Other programs (tar, dump, cpio) create archives --
> bundle a group of files and/or directory trees into a single file.

zip and some of the other compression tools also have a habbit
of not preserving file system permissions or ownership, which can
be handy in a backup, also may not support special devices(e.g.
sockets, fifos, character/block device entries etc). If you rely
upon file system ACLs on top of regular unix permissions things
might get more complicated, I don't use ACLs, so don't have
experience with preserving them in archives.

nate