Compressing data with gzip

The gzip application is a common compression format in the GNU/Linux platform. The gzip, gunzip, and zcat programs all handle gzip compression. These utilities only compress/decompress a single file or data stream. They cannot archive directories and multiple files directly. Fortunately, gzip can be used with both tar and cpio.

How to do it...

gzip will compress a file and gunzip will decompress it back to the original:

1. Compress a file with gzip:

$ gzip filename
        $ ls
        filename.gz

2. Extract a gzip compressed file:

$ gunzip filename.gz
        $ ls
        filename

3. In order to list the properties of a compressed file, use the following command:

$ gzip -l test.txt.gz
        compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
        35                   6 -33.3% test.txt

 

4. The gzip command can read a file from stdin and write a compressed file to stdout.

Read data from stdin and output the compressed data to stdout:

$ cat file | gzip -c > file.gz

 

The -c option...