Extract and delete all .gz in a directory- Linux

Question

I have a directory. It has about 500K .gz files.

How can I extract all .gz in that directory and delete the .gz files?

A `.gz` file need not necessarily be an archive. In that case you wouldn't have anything to delete upon performing `gzip -d file.gz`. — devnull, Apr 16 '13 at 14:03
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs to http://unix.stackexchange.com/ — Shankar Narayana Damodaran, May 23 '15 at 11:31

score 177 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 20 '13 at 18:13

177

This should do it:

gunzip *.gz

edited Nov 20 '13 at 18:13

ProgramFOX

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answered Nov 20 '13 at 17:55

Adrian Dunn

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... unless that gives you an 'argmuent too big' error. In which case, you'll want to use something like `find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -name '*.gz' -print0 | xjobs -0 -l50 -v2 gunzip` to restrict instances to 50 arguments each (and to run them in parallel). – Toby Speight Jul 27 '17 at 10:01
... or just `find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip {} +` to run them sequentially. Remove the `-maxdepth 1` to also traverse subdirectories, and replace `"$dir"` with the directory you want to examine (just `.` for current directory, or on Linux simply omit the directory). – tripleee May 22 '23 at 06:18

score 25 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '15 at 11:29

25

@techedemic is correct but is missing '.' to mention the current directory, and this command go throught all subdirectories.

find . -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip '{}' \;

edited May 23 '15 at 11:29

Shankar Narayana Damodaran

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answered Mar 17 '15 at 09:56

elhaj

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score 21 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 19 '17 at 14:20

There's more than one way to do this obviously.

    # This will find files recursively (you can limit it by using some 'find' parameters. 
    # see the man pages
    # Final backslash required for exec example to work
    find . -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip '{}' \;

    # This will do it only in the current directory
    for a in *.gz; do gunzip $a; done

I'm sure there's other ways as well, but this is probably the simplest.

And to remove it, just do a rm -rf *.gz in the applicable directory

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 06 '15 at 13:35

4

Extract all gz files in current directory and its subdirectories:

 find . -name "*.gz" | xargs gunzip

answered Jan 06 '15 at 13:35

Jokerius

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score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 15 '16 at 08:55

3

If you want to extract a single file use:

gunzip file.gz

It will extract the file and remove .gz file.

answered Jul 15 '16 at 08:55

Neelam

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score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 16 '13 at 13:19

1

for foo in *.gz
do
  tar xf "$foo"
  rm "$foo"
done

answered Apr 16 '13 at 13:19

Zombo

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Nothing in the question suggests that these are `tar` files. – tripleee May 22 '23 at 06:19

Supermath101 · Answer 7 · 2016-05-28T18:56:57.620

Try:

ls -1 | grep -E "\.tar\.gz$" | xargs -n 1 tar xvfz

Then Try:

ls -1 | grep -E "\.tar\.gz$" | xargs -n 1 rm

This will untar all .tar.gz files in the current directory and then delete all the .tar.gz files. If you want an explanation, the "|" takes the stdout of the command before it, and uses that as the stdin of the command after it. Use "man command" w/o the quotes to figure out what those commands and arguments do. Or, you can research online.

score -1 · Answer 8 · answered May 22 '23 at 06:00

-1

for deleting all .gz files in each and every directory. Please use this commands

step:1

cd /

step :2

find . -type f -iname *.gz -delete

answered May 22 '23 at 06:00

Krishna Mouli Jala

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Extract and delete all .gz in a directory- Linux

8 Answers8