11 Simple Gzip Examples

Gzip is used to compress a file in order to reduce disk space, it is quite popular in Linux and UNIX operating systems for this reason. Gzip has been around since May 1996 and is still widely used today.

We are going to cover 11 examples of gzip here, showing you common tasks that can be completed and just how easy it is to use.

Requirements

Before starting you will need to have the gzip package installed, this is usually already installed by default, however you can install it now if required.

RHEL:

yum install gzip

Debian:

apt-get install gzip

Example Gzip Commands

  • 1. Compress a single file
    This will compress file.txt and create file.txt.gz, note that this will remove the original file.txt file.

    gzip file.txt
    
  • 2. Compress multiple files at once
    This will compress all files specified in the command, note again that this will remove the original files specified by turning file1.txt, file2.txt and file3.txt into file1.txt.gz, file2.txt.gz and file3.txt.gz

    gzip file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
    

    To instead compress all files within a directory, see example 8 below.

  • 3. Compress a single file and keep the original
    You can instead keep the original file and create a compressed copy.

    gzip -c file.txt > file.txt.gz
    

    The -c flag outputs the compressed copy of file.txt to stdout, this is then sent to file.txt.gz, keeping the original file.txt file in place. Newer versions of gzip may also have -k or –keep available, which could be used instead with “gzip -k file.txt”.

  • 4. Compress all files recursively
    All files within the directory and all sub directories can be compressed recursively with the -r flag

    [root@centos test]# ls -laR
    .:
    drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   24 Jul 28 18:05 example
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root    8 Jul 28 17:09 file1.txt
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root    3 Jul 28 17:54 file2.txt
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root    5 Jul 28 17:54 file3.txt
    
    ./example:
    -rw-r--r--. 1 root root  5 Jul 28 18:00 example.txt
    
    [root@centos test]# gzip -r *
    [root@centos test]# ls -laR
    .:
    drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   27 Jul 28 18:07 example
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root   38 Jul 28 17:09 file1.txt.gz
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root   33 Jul 28 17:54 file2.txt.gz
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root   35 Jul 28 17:54 file3.txt.gz
    
    ./example:
    -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 37 Jul 28 18:00 example.txt.gz
    

    In the above example there are 3 .txt files in the test directory which is our current working directory, there is also an example sub directory which contains example.txt. Upon running gzip with the -r flag over everything, all files were recursively compressed.

    This can be reversed by running “gzip -dr *”, where -d is used to decompress and -r performs this on all of the files recursively.

  • 5. Decompress a gzip compressed file
    To reverse the compression process and get the original file back that you have compressed, you can use the gzip command itself or gunzip which is also part of the gzip package.

    gzip -d file.txt.gz
    

    OR

    gunzip file.txt.gz
    

    Both of these commands will produce the same result, decompressing file.txt.gz to file.txt, removing the compressed file.txt.gz file.

    Similar to example 3, it is possible to decompress a file and keep the original .gz file as below.

    gunzip -c file.txt.gz > file.txt
    

    As mentioned in step 4, -d can be combined with -r to decompress all files recursively.

  • 6. List compression information
    With the -l or --list flag we can see useful information regarding a compressed .gz file such as the compressed and uncompressed size of the file as well as the compression ratio, which shows us how much space our compression is saving.

    [root@centos ~]# gzip -l linux-3.18.19.tar.gz
             compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
              126117045           580761600  78.3% linux-3.18.19.tar
    
    [root@centos ~]# ls -lah
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root 554M Jul 28 17:24 linux-3.18.19.tar
    -rw-r--r--.  1 root root 121M Jul 28 17:25 linux-3.18.19.tar.gz
    

    In this example, a gzipped copy of the Linux kernel has compressed to 78.3% of its original size, taking up 121MB of space rather than 554MB.

  • 7. Adjust compression level
    The level of compression applied to a file using gzip can be specified as a value between 1 (less compression) and 9 (best compression). Using option 1 will complete faster, but space saved from the compression will not be optimal. Using option 9 will take longer to complete, however you will have the largest amount of space saved.

    The below example compares the differences between -1 and -9, as shown while -1 finishes much faster it compresses around 5% less (approximately 30mb more space required).

    [root@centos ~]# time gzip -1 linux-3.18.19.tar
    
    real    0m13.602s
    user    0m12.908s
    sys     0m0.662s
    [root@mirror1 ~]# gzip -l linux-3.18.19.tar.gz
             compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
              156001021           580761600  73.1% linux-3.18.19.tar
    
    [root@centos ~]# time gzip -9 linux-3.18.19.tar
    
    real    0m58.129s
    user    0m57.193s
    sys     0m0.735s
    [root@centos ~]# gzip -l linux-3.18.19.tar.gz
             compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
              125064095           580761600  78.5% linux-3.18.19.tar
    

    -1 can also be specified with the flag --fast, while option -9 can also be specified with the flag --best. By default gzip uses a compression level of -6, which is slightly biased towards higher compression at the expense of speed. When selecting a value between 1 and 9 it is important to consider what is more important to you, the amount of space saved or the amount of time spent compressing, the default -6 option provides a fair trade off.

  • 8. Compress a directory
    With the help of the tar command, we can create a tar file of a whole directory and gzip the result. We can perform the whole lot in one step, as the tar command allows us to specify a compression method to use.

    tar czvf etc.tar.gz /etc/
    

    This example creates a compressed etc.tar.gz file of the entire /etc/ directory. The tar flags are as follows, ‘c’ creates a new tar archive, ‘z’ specifies that we want to compress with gzip, ‘v’ provides verbose information, and ‘f’ specifies the file to create. The resulting etc.tar.gz file contains all files within /etc/ compressed using gzip.

  • 9. Integrity test
    The -t or --test flag can be used to check the integrity of a compressed file.

    On a normal file, the result will be listed as OK, shown below.

    [root@centos test]# gzip -tv file1.txt.gz
    file1.txt.gz:    OK
    

    I have now manually modified this file with a text editor and added a random value, essentially introducing corruption and it is now no longer valid.

    [root@centos test]# gzip -tv file1.txt.gz
    file1.txt.gz:
    gzip: file1.txt.gz: invalid compressed data--crc error
    gzip: file1.txt.gz: invalid compressed data--length error
    

    The compressed .gz file makes use of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) in order to detect errors. The CRC value can be viewed by running gzip with the -l and -v flags, as shown below.

    [root@centos test]# gzip -lv file1.txt.gz
    method  crc     date  time           compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
    defla 08db5c50 Jul 28 18:15                  40           167772160 100.0% file1.txt
    
  • 10. Concatenate multiple files
    Multiple files can be concatenated into a single .gz file.

    gzip -c file1.txt > files.gz
    gzip -c file2.txt >> files.gz
    

    The files.gz now contains the contents of both file1.txt and file2.txt, if you decompress files.gz you will get a file named ‘files’ which contains the content of both .txt files. The output is similar to running ‘cat file1.txt file2.txt’. If instead you want to create a single file that contains multiple files you can use the tar command which supports gzip compression, as covered above in example 8.



  • 11. Additional commands included with gzip
    The gzip package provides some very useful commands for working with compressed files, such as zcat, zgrep and zless/zmore.

    As you can probably tell by the names of the commands, these are essentially the cat, grep, and less/more commands, however they work directly on compressed data. This means that you can easily view or search the contents of a compressed file without having to decompress it and then view or search it in a second step.

    [root@centos test]# zcat test.txt.gz
    test
    example
    text
    [root@centos test]# zgrep exa test.txt.gz
    example
    

    This is especially useful when searching through or reviewing log files which have been compressed during log rotation.

Summary

As shown the gzip package can be used in a number of helpful ways to compress data and save disk space. For further information on gzip you can refer to the gzip manual page, or leave a comment below!

  1. how to rename the gzip output file

  2. Which command of gzip shows you the speed in Mb/sec?

  3. I couldn’t understand where I must write these commands to unzip a file. I feel ridiculous, but you write as if everybody knows. Probably I should go “under” Windows

    • Gzip is a tool for Linux, you execute the commands through the command line. If you are not familiar with how to use the command line, you should learn that as a prerequisite before attempting to use gzip.

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