gunzip Command in Linux

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NAME

gunzip, gzip - compress or expand files

SYNOPSIS

gunzip [ -acfhlLnNrtvV ] [-S suffix] [ name ... ]
gzip [ -acdfhlLnNrtvV19 ] [-S suffix] [ name ... ]

DESCRIPTION

gunzip takes a list of files on its command line and replaces each file whose name ends with .gz, -gz, .z, -z, _z or .Z and which begins with the correct magic number with an uncompressed file without the original extension. gunzip also recognizes the special extensions .tgz and .taz as shorthands for .tar.gz and .tar.Z respectively. When compressing, gzip uses the .tgz extension if necessary instead of truncating a file with a .tar extension.

gunzip can currently decompress files created by gzip, zip, compress, compress -H or pack. The detection of the input format is automatic. When using the first two formats, gunzip checks a 32 bit CRC. For pack, gunzip checks the uncompressed length. The standard compress format was not designed to allow consistency checks. However gunzip is sometimes able to detect a bad .Z file. If you get an error when uncompressing a .Z file, do not assume that the .Z file is correct simply because the standard uncompress does not complain. This generally means that the standard uncompress does not check its input, and happily generates garbage output. The SCO compress -H format (lzh compression method) does not include a CRC but also allows some consistency checks.

Files created by zip can be uncompressed by gzip only if they have a single member compressed with the 'deflation' method. This feature is only intended to help conversion of tar.zip files to the tar.gz format. To extract a zip file with a single member, use a command like gunzip <foo.zip or gunzip -S .zip foo.zip. To extract zip files with several members, use unzip instead of gunzip.

Options

EXAMPLES

Example-1:

To Decompress A File Using The "gunzip" Command:

$ gunzip myfilename.gz

output:

$ ls
myfilename.gz

$ gunzip myfilename.gz

$ ls
myfilename

Example-2:

Force A File To Decompress:

$ gunzip -f myfilename.gz

output:

$ ls
myfilename.gz

$ gunzip myfilename.gz

$ ls
myfilename

Example-3:

To keep both the compressed and decompressed file:

$ gunzip -k myfile.gz

output:

$ ls
myfilename.gz

$ gunzip -k myfilename.gz

$ ls
myfilename  myfilename.gz

Example-4:

To display compressed output:

$ gunzip -l myfile.gz

output:

$ gunzip -l myfilename.gz
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
                 31                   0   0.0% myfilename

Example-5:

Decompressing Lots Of Files Recursively:

$ gunzip -r /tmp

output:

$ ls /tmp/
myfilename1.gz  myfilename.gz

$ gunzip -r /tmp/

$ ls /tmp/
myfilename  myfilename1