Compresses mysamplefile.
$ ls -l
Observe the results of this command: mysamplefile is now called mysamplefile.gz . It’s also a good bit smaller.
$ gunzip mysamplefile.gz; ls -l
This uncompresses the file. Observe that mysamplefile has returned to its original state. Notice that to uncompress, one uses gunzip, not gzip.
$ rm mysamplefile
Use this command to remove the file, since it was just to practice with.
7.4 Finding Files
There are two different facilities for finding files: find and locate. find searches the actual files in their present state. locate searches an index generated by the system every morning at 6:42 a.m. (this is a cron job, explained elsewhere in this book). locate won’t find any files that were created after the index was generated. However, because locate searches an index, it’s much faster—like using the index of a book rather than looking through the whole thing.
To compare the two ways of finding files, pretend you can’t remember where the X configuration file XF86Config resides.