CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linux
santh
santh

Reputation: 91

unzip .gz file as a directory

New to Linux

had gzip the folder as abc.gz. now when i try using the gunzip command the file doesn't come as folder, instead the output file has become abc. could someone let me know the command to unzip the abc.gz as a folder.

thanks

Upvotes: 9

Views: 17040

Answers (2)

willeM_ Van Onsem
willeM_ Van Onsem

Reputation: 477881

gzip compresses one single file, and doesn't store the original filename (you could for instance compress a network stream you captured once, that didn't had a name) into that file. If you need to compress multiple files, you need to make use of a tarball (a collection of files packed into a single file, a tarball stores the name of the files as well).

When you read the manual of gzip (man gzip), you can see that you simply use

gzip -d < "file.gz" > "realfile.dat"

to decompress the file stored in "file.gz" and save it as "realfile.dat".

Now if you have compressed multiple files, you need to do this using the earlier called tarball. Perhaps you dropped the extension. In that case, you can first decompress the .gz file and then use tar to expand it using:

gzip -d < "file.tar.gz" | tar -x

Here tar reads from stdin (data provided by gzip and expands it). Since people use gzip on tar a lot of times, tar made it more convenient using:

tar -xzf "file.tar.gz"

where z means you want to run gzip on it, and f means that you read from a file instead of the stdin.

In order to create such archive, you again first need to use tar:

tar -c "folder" | gzip -c > "file.tar.gz"

Or, tar again comes up with a shorter way to do this:

tar -czf "file.tar.gz" "folder"

Upvotes: 10

deimus
deimus

Reputation: 9893

gunzip functions as a decompression algorithm only.

so gunzip would simply leave with the file decompressed, on which you would then need e.g. to tar xvf file.tar.

The z option of tar is simply a shortcut to do the decompression with gzip along with extracting the files.

Upvotes: 3

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