There are 10 levels of compression provided by zip command.
- Level 0 is the lowest level, where it just archives the file without any compression.
- Level 1 will perform little compression. But, will be very fast.
- Level 6 is the default level of compression.
- Level 9 is the maximum compression. This will be slower when compared to default level. In my opinion, unless you are compressing a huge file, you should always use level 9.
In the example below, I used Level 0, default Level 6, and Level 9 compression on a same directory. See the compressed file size yourself.
# zip var-log-files-default.zip /var/log/* # zip -0 var-log-files-0.zip /var/log/* # zip -9 var-log-files-9.zip /var/log/* # ls -ltr -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2817248 Jan 1 13:05 var-log-files-default.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41415301 Jan 1 13:05 var-log-files-0.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2582610 Jan 1 13:06 var-log-files-9.zip