man > gzip(1)

TLDR: gzip (tldr-pages)

Compress/uncompress files with `gzip` compression (LZ77).

  • Compress a file, replacing it with a `gzip` archive
    gzip {{path/to/file}}
  • Decompress a file, replacing it with the original uncompressed version
    gzip {{-d|--decompress}} {{path/to/file.gz}}
  • Display the name and reduction percentage for each file compressed
    gzip {{-v|--verbose}} {{path/to/file.gz}}
  • Compress a file, keeping the original file
    gzip {{-k|--keep}} {{path/to/file}}
  • Compress a file, specifying the output filename
    gzip {{-c|--stdout}} {{path/to/file}} > {{path/to/compressed_file.gz}}
  • Decompress a `gzip` archive specifying the output filename
    gzip {{-cd|--stdout --decompress}} {{path/to/file.gz}} > {{path/to/uncompressed_file}}
  • Specify the compression level. 1 is the fastest (low compression), 9 is the slowest (high compression), 6 is the default
    gzip -{{1..9}} {{-c|--stdout}} {{path/to/file}} > {{path/to/compressed_file.gz}}
  • List the contents of a compressed file
    gzip {{-l|--list}} {{path/to/file.txt.gz}}
GZIP(1)                                General Commands Manual                               GZIP(1)

NAME
       gzip, gunzip, zcat - compress or expand files

SYNOPSIS
       gzip [ -acdfhklLnNrtvV19 ] [-S suffix] [ name ...  ]
       gunzip [ -acfhklLnNrtvV ] [-S suffix] [ name ...  ]
       zcat [ -fhLV ] [ name ...  ]

DESCRIPTION
       The  gzip  command reduces the size of the named files using Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77).  When‐
       ever possible, each file is replaced by one with the extension .gz, while  keeping  the  same
       ownership  modes, access and modification times.  (The default extension is z for MSDOS, OS/2
       FAT, Windows NT FAT and Atari.)  If no files are specified, or if a file  name  is  "-",  the
       standard  input  is compressed to the standard output.  The gzip command will only attempt to
       compress regular files.  In particular, it will ignore symbolic links.

       If the compressed file name is too long for its file system, gzip  truncates  it.   The  gzip
       command  attempts  to  truncate only the parts of the file name longer than 3 characters.  (A
       part is delimited by dots.) If the name consists of small parts only, the longest  parts  are
       truncated.  For  example,  if file names are limited to 14 characters, gzip.msdos.exe is com‐
       pressed to gzi.msd.exe.gz.  Names are not truncated on systems which do not have a  limit  on
       file name length.

       By default, gzip keeps the original file name and timestamp in the compressed file. These are
       used  when decompressing the file with the -N option. This is useful when the compressed file
       name was truncated or when the timestamp was not preserved after a file transfer.

       Compressed files can be restored to their original form using gzip -d or gunzip or zcat.   If
       the  original  name  saved  in the compressed file is not suitable for its file system, a new
       name is constructed from the original one to make it legal.

       gunzip takes a list of files on its command line and replaces each file whose name ends  with
       .gz,  -gz,  .z, -z, or _z (ignoring case) and which begins with the correct magic number with
       an uncompressed file without the original extension.  gunzip also recognizes the special  ex‐
       tensions  .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 and gunzip checks the uncompressed length.  The  standard  com‐
       press  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  gener‐
       ally  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.

       The zcat command is identical to gunzip -c.  (On some systems, zcat may be installed as gzcat
       to preserve the original link to compress.)  zcat uncompresses either a list of files on  the
       command line or its standard input and writes the uncompressed data on standard output.  zcat
       will  uncompress  files  that have the correct magic number whether they have a .gz suffix or
       not.

       The gzip command uses the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used in zip and PKZIP.  The amount of compres‐
       sion obtained depends on the size of the input and the  distribution  of  common  substrings.
       Typically,  text  such as source code or English is reduced by 60-70%.  Compression is gener‐
       ally much better than that achieved by LZW (as used in compress), Huffman coding (as used  in
       pack), or adaptive Huffman coding (compact).

       Compression  is  always  performed,  even  if the compressed file is slightly larger than the
       original. The worst case expansion is a few bytes for the gzip file header, plus 5 bytes  per
       32 KiB block, or an expansion ratio of 0.015% for large files. The actual number of used disk
       blocks almost never increases.

       gzip normally preserves the mode and modification timestamp of a file when compressing or de‐
       compressing.  If  you  have  appropriate  privileges,  it also preserves the file's owner and
       group.

OPTIONS
       -a --ascii
              Ascii text mode: convert end-of-lines using local conventions.  This  option  is  sup‐
              ported  only  on  some non-Unix systems. For MSDOS, CR LF is converted to LF when com‐
              pressing, and LF is converted to CR LF when decompressing.

       -c --stdout --to-stdout
              Write output on standard output; keep original files unchanged.  If there are  several
              input files, the output consists of a sequence of independently compressed members. To
              obtain better compression, concatenate all input files before compressing them.

       -d --decompress --uncompress
              Decompress.

       -f --force
              Force  compression  or decompression even if the file has multiple links or the corre‐
              sponding file already exists, or if the compressed data is read from or written  to  a
              terminal.  If  the input data is not in a format recognized by gzip, and if the option
              --stdout is also given, copy the input data without change to the standard output: let
              zcat behave as cat.  If -f is not given, and when not running in the background,  gzip
              prompts to verify whether an existing file should be overwritten.

       -h --help
              Display a help screen and quit.

       -k --keep
              Keep (don't delete) input files during compression or decompression.

       -l --list
              For each compressed file, list the following fields:

                  compressed size: size of the compressed file
                  uncompressed size: size of the uncompressed file
                  ratio: compression ratio (0.0% if unknown)
                  uncompressed_name: name of the uncompressed file

              The  uncompressed size is given as -1 for files not in gzip format, such as compressed
              .Z files. To get the uncompressed size for such a file, you can use:

                  zcat file.Z | wc -c

              In combination with the --verbose option, the following fields are also displayed:

                  method: compression method
                  crc: the 32-bit CRC of the uncompressed data
                  date & time: timestamp for the uncompressed file

              The compression methods currently supported are deflate, compress, lzh  (SCO  compress
              -H) and pack.  The crc is given as ffffffff for a file not in gzip format.

              With  --name,  the uncompressed name,  date and time  are those stored within the com‐
              press file if present.

              With --verbose, the size totals and compression ratio for all files is also displayed,
              unless some sizes are unknown. With --quiet, the title and totals lines are  not  dis‐
              played.

       -L --license
              Display the gzip license and quit.

       -n --no-name
              When  compressing,  do  not save the original file name and timestamp by default. (The
              original name is always saved if the name had to be truncated.) When decompressing, do
              not restore the original file name if present (remove only the gzip  suffix  from  the
              compressed  file  name)  and do not restore the original timestamp if present (copy it
              from the compressed file). This option is the default when decompressing.

       -N --name
              When compressing, always save the original file name, and save the seconds part of the
              original modification timestamp if the original is a regular file and its timestamp is
              at least 1 (1970-01-01 00:00:01 UTC) and is less than 2**32 (2106-02-07 06:28:16  UTC,
              assuming  leap  seconds are not counted); this is the default. When decompressing, re‐
              store from the saved file name and timestamp if present. This option is useful on sys‐
              tems which have a limit on file name length or when the timestamp has been lost  after
              a file transfer.

       -q --quiet
              Suppress all warnings.

       -r --recursive
              Travel  the directory structure recursively. If any of the file names specified on the
              command line are directories, gzip will descend into the directory  and  compress  all
              the files it finds there (or decompress them in the case of gunzip ).

       -S .suf --suffix .suf
              When  compressing, use suffix .suf instead of .gz.  Any non-empty suffix can be given,
              but suffixes other than .z and .gz should be avoided to avoid confusion when files are
              transferred to other systems.

              When decompressing, add .suf to the beginning of the list of suffixes to try, when de‐
              riving an output file name from an input file name.

       --synchronous
              Use synchronous output.  With this option, gzip is less likely to lose data  during  a
              system crash, but it can be considerably slower.

       -t --test
              Test. Check the compressed file integrity then quit.

       -v --verbose
              Verbose.  Display the name and percentage reduction for each file compressed or decom‐
              pressed.

       -V --version
              Version. Display the version number and compilation options then quit.

       -# --fast --best
              Regulate the speed of compression using the specified digit #, where -1 or --fast  in‐
              dicates  the  fastest compression method (less compression) and -9 or --best indicates
              the slowest compression method (best compression).  The default compression  level  is
              -6 (that is, biased towards high compression at expense of speed).

       --rsyncable
              When you synchronize a compressed file between two computers, this option allows rsync
              to transfer only files that were changed in the archive instead of the entire archive.
              Normally, after a change is made to any file in the archive, the compression algorithm
              can  generate a new version of the archive that does not match the previous version of
              the archive. In this case, rsync transfers the entire new version of  the  archive  to
              the  remote  computer.  With this option, rsync can transfer only the changed files as
              well as a small amount of metadata that is required to update the archive structure in
              the area that was changed.

ADVANCED USAGE
       Multiple compressed files can be concatenated. In this case, gunzip will extract all  members
       at once. For example:

             gzip -c file1  > foo.gz
             gzip -c file2 >> foo.gz

       Then

             gunzip -c foo

       is equivalent to

             cat file1 file2

       In  case  of damage to one member of a .gz file, other members can still be recovered (if the
       damaged member is removed). However, you can get better compression by compressing  all  mem‐
       bers at once:

             cat file1 file2 | gzip > foo.gz

       compresses better than

             gzip -c file1 file2 > foo.gz

       If you want to recompress concatenated files to get better compression, do:

             gzip -cd old.gz | gzip > new.gz

       If  a  compressed file consists of several members, the uncompressed size and CRC reported by
       the --list option applies to the last member only. If you need the uncompressed size for  all
       members, you can use:

             gzip -cd file.gz | wc -c

       If  you  wish to create a single archive file with multiple members so that members can later
       be extracted independently, use an archiver such as tar or zip. GNU tar supports the  -z  op‐
       tion to invoke gzip transparently. gzip is designed as a complement to tar, not as a replace‐
       ment.

ENVIRONMENT
       The  obsolescent environment variable GZIP can hold a set of default options for gzip.  These
       options are interpreted first and can be overwritten by explicit command line parameters.  As
       this can cause problems when using scripts, this feature is supported only for  options  that
       are reasonably likely to not cause too much harm, and gzip warns if it is used.  This feature
       will be removed in a future release of gzip.

       You  can  use  an alias or script instead.  For example, if gzip is in the directory /usr/bin
       you can prepend $HOME/bin to your PATH and create an executable  script  $HOME/bin/gzip  con‐
       taining the following:

             #! /bin/sh
             export PATH=/usr/bin
             exec gzip -9 "$@"

SEE ALSO
       znew(1), zcmp(1), zmore(1), zforce(1), gzexe(1), zip(1), unzip(1), compress(1)

       The  gzip file format is specified in P. Deutsch, GZIP file format specification version 4.3,
       <https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1952.txt>, Internet RFC 1952 (May 1996).  The zip deflation for‐
       mat is specified in P. Deutsch, DEFLATE Compressed Data  Format  Specification  version  1.3,
       <https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt>, Internet RFC 1951 (May 1996).

DIAGNOSTICS
       Exit  status  is  normally 0; if an error occurs, exit status is 1. If a warning occurs, exit
       status is 2.

       Usage: gzip [-cdfhklLnNrtvV19] [-S suffix] [file ...]
              Invalid options were specified on the command line.

       file: not in gzip format
              The file specified to gunzip has not been compressed.

       file: Corrupt input. Use zcat to recover some data.
              The compressed file has been damaged. The data up to the point of failure can  be  re‐
              covered using

                    zcat file > recover

       file: compressed with xx bits, can only handle yy bits
              File  was  compressed (using LZW) by a program that could deal with more bits than the
              decompress code on this machine.  Recompress the file with gzip, which compresses bet‐
              ter and uses less memory.

       file: already has .gz suffix -- unchanged
              The file is assumed to be already compressed.  Rename the file and try again.

       file already exists; do you wish to overwrite (y or n)?
              Respond "y" if you want the output file to be replaced; "n" if not.

       gunzip: corrupt input
              A SIGSEGV violation was detected which usually means that the input file has been cor‐
              rupted.

       xx.x% Percentage of the input saved by compression.
              (Relevant only for -v and -l.)

       -- not a regular file or directory: ignored
              When the input file is not a regular file or directory, (e.g. a symbolic link, socket,
              FIFO, device file), it is left unaltered.

       -- has xx other links: unchanged
              The input file has links; it is left unchanged.  See ln(1) for more  information.  Use
              the -f flag to force compression of multiply-linked files.

CAVEATS
       When  writing compressed data to a tape, it is generally necessary to pad the output with ze‐
       roes up to a block boundary. When the data is read and the whole block is  passed  to  gunzip
       for  decompression,  gunzip detects that there is extra trailing garbage after the compressed
       data and emits a warning by default.  You can use the --quiet option to suppress the warning.

BUGS
       In some rare cases, the --best option gives worse compression than  the  default  compression
       level (-6). On some highly redundant files, compress compresses better than gzip.

REPORTING BUGS
       Report bugs to: bug-gzip AT gnu.org
       GNU gzip home page: <https://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/>
       General help using GNU software: <https://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
       Copyright © 1998-1999, 2001-2002, 2012, 2015-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
       Copyright © 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly

       Permission  is  granted  to  make  and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the
       copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the  con‐
       ditions  for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed
       under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual  into  another  lan‐
       guage,  under  the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice
       may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.

                                                local                                        GZIP(1)
gzip(1)
NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION OPTIONS
-a --ascii -c --stdout --to-stdout -d --decompress --uncompress -f --force -h --help -k --keep -l --list -L --license -n --no-name -N --name -q --quiet -r --recursive -S .suf --suffix .suf --synchronous -t --test -v --verbose -V --version -# --fast --best --rsyncable
ADVANCED USAGE ENVIRONMENT SEE ALSO DIAGNOSTICS CAVEATS BUGS REPORTING BUGS COPYRIGHT NOTICE

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