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Maca
Asked: 2012-03-14 02:44:49 +0800 CST

Gzip mistake with directory

  • 772

I accidently gzip -rv directory and now all individual files is in .gz format. How do I undo this and gunzip all .gz files within the directory?

And how do I just gzip this whole directory?

I tried gunzip directory/*.gz but only gunzip the files in directory/ it doesn't gunzip directory beyond "directory".

linux gzip

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    To unzip your files, do the following: 

    find /yourdirectory -name *gz | xargs gunzip

    This will unzip all files with the name *.gz find can find under the directory /yourdirectory.

    For gzipping a whole directory, you need a tar container, as gzip can only compress individual files: 

    tar czvf archive.tgz /yourdirectory

    If you want the (much slower but much more effective) bzip2 compression, use the j instead the z parameter: 

    tar cjvf archive.tbz2 /yourdirectory

    Both commands will create a compressed archive, there is no need to do an additional compression step afterwards.

    • 6

  2. This would do the trick:

    gzip -d -r directory
    • 0

  3. Tar the directory first with tar -cf myarchive.tar myarchive/and compress it afterwards with gzip myarchive.tar.

    You can unpack this afterwards with tar -xvf myarchive.tar.gz with newer versions of tar. With older versions you should add use -xvzf instead

    • -3