gzip: Cheat Sheet

Learn essential commands for compressing, decompressing, and managing compressed files with this quick reference guide. Perfect for system administrators and anyone working with large files!

Gzip is a file compression tool used to reduce the size of files. It is commonly used in Unix-like operating systems.

Compress

Zip all files and all files in sub-directories of the specified starting path.

gzip -r .

Zip all JSON files in current directory and all sub-directories. If file names contain spaces then will need to quote the arg passed to gzip.

find . -type f -name '*.json' -exec gzip {} \;

Decompess

Unzip all files and all files in sub-directories of the specified starting path.

gunzip -r .

Unzip a set of files matching a pattern in directory and keep the original files (-k)

for a in `ls *.log.gz`; do gunzip -k $a; done