gzip Command: Tutorial & Examples
Compress or decompress files
The gzip
command is a Unix utility that compresses and decompresses files. It is a common file compression utility that uses the GNU zip (gzip) algorithm to compress and
decompress files.
To use the gzip
command to compress a file, you can specify the name of the file you want to compress as an argument. For example:
gzip file.txt
This will compress the file file.txt
and create a new compressed file called file.txt.gz
.
To decompress a file that has been compressed with gzip
, you can use the -d
option. For example:
gzip -d file.txt.gz
This will decompress the file file.txt.gz
and create a new decompressed file called file.txt
.
The gzip
command has several options that allow you to customize its behavior, such as specifying the level of compression, specifying the output file name, and displaying the
progress of the compression or decompression process.
For example, you can use the following command to compress a file with the highest compression level:
gzip -9 file.txt
Although gzip
is more or less the standard compression utility, its performance is not very good, especially when the compression level is high. We would recommend, that you use
the zstd
command instead which supports much higher compression speeds and generally better compression.
Further Reading
- Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers by Peter Wayner
- Data Compression: The Complete Reference by D. Salomon
- Handbook of Data Compression by D. Salomon, Giovanni Motta, D. Bryant
- Introduction to Data Compression by Khalid Sayood
- Compression & Encryption by D. James Benton
- Understanding Compression by Colt McAnlis, Aleks Haecky
- Managing Gigabytes by Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell