What is gzip in Linux?

The gzip command in Linux comes as part of the GNU Core-utilities package and is used to compress or decompress files.

Arguments

The gzip command has many functionalities, which we can access by using the right flag.

In this shot, we will review some of the most widely used flags for gzip.

1. gzip file1

The gzip command is used without any flags to compress one or more files. The filenames are sent as arguments to the gzip command.

Note that the original file is deleted, but the timestamp, mode and ownership, and name of the old file are preserved in the compressed file.

2. gzip -k file1

If you do not want the original file to be deleted, use the -k flag.

3. gzip -v file1

The -v flag stands for verbose and works the same way as gzip without any flags. The only difference is that it generates a report of the compressed and uncompressed file, which contains the percentage reduction of each processed file.

4. gzip file1 file2 file3

Multiple files may be compressed by giving multiple file names as arguments to the gzip command.

5. gzip -r folder

To compress the files in a directory or folder, its path from the current directory is sent as an argument to the gzip command along with the -r flag, which recursively navigates its way up through the entire directory and compresses all the files in it.

6. gzip -1 file1

The gzip command allows the user to set a compression level ranging from 1 to 9. 1 provides the minimum amount of compression but the fastest speed.On the other hand, 9 is used to maximize compression but at the cost of slow speed. Level 6 balances the two trade-offs well.

7. gzip -d arch.gz

The gzip command is used with the -d flag to decompress gz archives. The name of the archive is sent as an argument after the -d flag. The archive itself is lost.

8. gzip -dk arch.gz

To preserve the archive that is decompressed, use the dk flag instead.

9. gzip -dr folder

To decompress all the compressed files or folders in a directory, use the -dr flag and send the path to this directory as the argument.

gzip -h

The -h flag is used to open the manual page for gzip, which contains additional information about it.

The gzip command can only compress the files inside a folder on Linux and not the folder itself. The -z flag of tar is used for this purpose!

Example

In the example below, we first use the ls command to list down all the folders and files in the current directory.

We create a new text file using the echo command and compress it using the -v flag, which compresses the text file and states the compression ratio. We use the ls command to see that we now have the compressed text file.