How do I Compress a directory in Linux?

Using tar command you can compress a directory as follows 

syntax: tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name
Where,

• -z: Compress archive using gzip program
• -c: Create archive
• -v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
• -f: Archive File name

For example, if you want to compress /home/sjamso/webfiles then the command is:

# tar -zcvf mycompressfile-20-01-11.tar.gz /home/sjamso/webfiles

The above command will create a compress file named mycompressfile-20-01-11.tar.gz in current directory. The compress file will contain all the file in /home, all files in /sjamso and all files in /webfiles

To restore or unzip tar files:

# tar -zxvf mycompressfile-20-01-11.tar.gz

Where -x: Extract files