zstd Command: Tutorial & Examples
Compress or decompress files
zstd
is a data compression utility that is similar to gzip
and bzip2
. It uses a compression algorithm called Zstandard, which is
designed to provide high compression ratios while still being fast to compress and decompress data.
To use zstd
to compress a file, you can specify the name of the file you want to compress as an argument. By default, zstd
will create a compressed file with a .zst
extension. For example:
zstd file.txt
This will compress the file file.txt
and create a new compressed file called file.txt.zst
.
To decompress a file that has been compressed with zstd
, you can use the -d
or --decompress
option. For example:
zstd --decompress file.txt.zst
This will decompress the file file.txt.zst
and create a new decompressed file called file.txt
.
zstd
has several options that allow you to customize its behavior, such as specifying the level of compression, specifying the output file name, and displaying the progress of
the compression or decompression process. It is a useful tool for compressing and decompressing files on a Unix system, especially when a high level of compression is desired.
If you want to compress not only a single file, but a directory instead, you can use zstd
together with the tar
command:
tar --zstd -cvf directory.tar.zst directory
We recommend to use zstd
instead of other compression tools because of its much better performance and usually better compression ratio.