Gzip Command in Linux

Gzip is one of the most popular compression algorithms that allows you to reduce the size of a file and keep the original file mode, ownership, and timestamp. Gzip is the algorithm that is used by web servers to compress pages and assets before sending it to the client browser.

Gzip also refers to the .gz file format and the gzip utility , which you can use to compress and decompress files.

This article will teach you how to use the gzip command.

gzip Command Syntax #

The general syntax for the gzip command is as follows:

gzip [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Gzip compresses only single files and creates a compressed file for each given file. By convention, the name of a file compressed with Gzip should end with either .gz or .z.

If you want to compress multiple files or a directory into one compressed file, first you need to create a Tar archive and then compress the .tar file with Gzip. A file that ends in .tar.gz or .tgz is a Tar archive compressed with Gzip.

Gzip is mainly used to compress text files, Tar archives, and web pages. Do not use Gzip to compress images, audio, PDF documents, and other binary files, as they are already compressed.

gzip can compress only regular files. Symbolic links are ignored.

Compressing Files with gzip #

To compress a single file, invoke the gzip command followed by the filename:

gzip filename

gzip will create a file filename.gz and delete the original file.

By default, gzip keeps the original file timestamp, mode, ownership, and name in the compressed file.

Keep the original file #

If you want to keep the input (original) file, use the -k option:

gzip -k filename

Another option to keep the original file is to use the -c option, which tells gzip to write on standard output and redirect the output to a file:

gzip -c filename > filename.gz

Verbose output #

Use the -v option if you want to see the percentage reduction and the names of the files that are being processed:

gzip -v filename   

filename:	  7.5% -- replaced with filename.gz

Compress multiple files #

You can also pass multiple files as arguments to the command. For example, to compress the files named file1, file2, file3, you would run the following command:

gzip file1 file2 file3

The command above will create three compressed files, file1.gz, file2.gz, file3.gz.

Compress all files in a directory #

To compress all files in a given directory, use the -r option:

gzip -r directory

gzip will recursively traverse through the whole directory structure and compress all the files in the directory and it’s subdirectories.

Change the compression level #

gzip allows you to specify a range of compression levels, from 1 to 9. -1 or --fast means the fastest compression speed with minimal compression ratio, and -9 or --best indicates the slowest compression speed with maximum compression ratio. The default compression level is -6.

For example, to get maximum compression, you would run:

gzip -9 filename

Compression is a CPU-intensive task; the higher the compression level, the longer the process takes.

Using standard input #

To create a .gz file from the stdin, pipe the output of the command to gzip. For example, to create a Gzipped MySQL database backup , you would run:

mysqldump database_name | gzip -c > database_name.sql.gz

The output of the mysqldump command will be input for gzip.

Decompressing Files with gzip #

To decompress a .gz file , use the -d option:

gzip -d filename.gz

Another command that you can use to decompress a Gzip file is gunzip . This command is just an alias to gzip -d:

gunzip filename.gz

You might find it easier to remember gunzip than gzip -d.

Keep the compressed file #

Same as when compressing a file, the -k option tells gzip to keep the input file, in this case, that is the compressed file:

gzip -dk filename.gz

Decompress multiple files #

To decompress multiple files at once, pass the filenames to the gzip command as arguments:

gzip -d file1.gz file2.gz file3.gz

Decompress all files in a directory #

When used with -d and -r options, gzip decompresses all files in a given directory recursively:

gzip -dr directory

List the Compressed File Contents #

When used with the -l option, the gzip command shows statistics about the given compressed files:

gzip -l filename

The output will include the uncompressed file name, the compressed and uncompressed size, and the compression ratio:

         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
                130                 107   7.5% filename

To get more information, add the -v option:

gzip -lv filename

method  crc     date  time           compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
defla a9b9e776 Sep  3 21:20                 130                 107   7.5% filename

Conclusion #

With Gzip, you can reduce the size of a given file. The gzip command allows you to compress and decompress files.

For more information about the gzip command, consult the Gnu gzip documentation page .

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.