How to gzip multiple files into one gz file?

Question

I have 100 files: cvd1.txt cvd2.txt ... cvd100.txt

How to gzip 100 files into one .gz file so that after I gunzip it, I should have cvd1.txt, cvd2.txt ... cvd100.txt separately?

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

if you have zip,

zip myzip.zip cvd*.txt

Don't need to tar them first.

Answer 2

You want to tar your files together and gzip the resulting tar file.

tar cfvz cvd.tar.gz cvd*.txt

To untar the gzip'd tar file you would do:

tar xfvz cvd.tar.gz -C /path/to/parent/dir

This would extract your files under the /path/to/parent/dir directory

Answer 3

You'll want to use tar, like so:

tar -czvf file.tar.gz cvd*.txt

tar puts the files together, while gzip then performs the compression.

Quoth the gzip manpage:

If you wish to create a single archive file with multiple members so that members can later be extracted independently, use an archiver such as tar or zip. GNU tar supports the -z option to invoke gzip transpar‐ ently. gzip is designed as a complement to tar, not as a replacement.

Answer 4

gzip by itself does not know anything about file structure. To do what you want, you need to first put the files into some kind of container file (e.g. a tar structure, or similar) and then gzip that. tar has z and j (for bzip2) switches on GNU platforms to do this.