= 7z Linux Command Line Cookbook of Examples
:homepage: https://github.com/yuriskinfo/cheat-sheets
:toc:

Author: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yurislobodyanyuk/ 

== Important facts about 7-zip
* 7-zip does NOT store the owner/group of the files/folders being archived, which is good for privacy, but may not suite your specifc use case, especially as a back up tool.
* 7-zip is a name of the compression tool created by Igor Pavlov. 
* While Igor Pavlov provides Linux/macOS versions as well, another implementation by independent developer (Mohammed Adnene Trojette) has become wide used in the Linux realm - `p7zip`. This cookbook relates to this, independent version, so options and switches may differ a bit from 7-zip Windows canonical version.

== Install p7zip package on Linux
This tool is already in all the major repositories, so you should have no problems installing it.

`Ubuntu`: `sudo apt install p7zip-full`

`CentOS/Fedora`: `sudo yum install p7zip p7zip-plugins`

== Create an archive adding all the files in the current folder
We first indicate to `7-zip` that we want to _add_ to an archive with `a` command, then we specify the archive name, and finally, we use `*` as wildcard to include all files in the current folder.

`7z a folder.7z *`

The result - _folder.7z_ will be placed in the same folder where it run.