Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Compressing and Packaging Files to Share

Life isn’t all about “take, take, take” (or at least I should hope not!). Sometimes you’ve just gotta give. Creating care packages to share with other folks involves finding how to tell Nautilus that you want to do so.

To package up and compress files for sending off to other people, navigate to the location where you’ve stored the file(s) — see Chapter 8 for how to move about in Nautilus — and then:

1.	Determine whether you want to compress or package a single file, a group of files, or a whole folder. If the files and folders that you want to bundle together are flung all over the place in your filesystem, you may want to create a new folder and copy the items you want to bundle together into it — just for the sake of convenience. Chapter 8 shows you how to do so.
2.	Select the item(s) you want to package. Chapter 8 explains how to do so. If you want to select a whole folder, navigate into its parent folder and just select the folder’s icon instead of entering it.
3.	Right-click over the item(s) (or choose the Edit menu). The context menu appears if you right-clicked or, in Nautilus, the Edit menu opens.
4.	In the context or Edit menu, choose Create Archive. The Create Archive dialog box appears, suggesting a tarball (refer to Table 16-1) version of the file.
5.	If you want a tarball, leave it alone, or change the file extensions (as discussed in Table 16-1) to match what you want.
6.	Click Create. Nautilus uses the end of the file’s ...