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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?

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6 Answers 6

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59

if you have zip,

zip myzip.zip cvd*.txt

Don't need to tar them first.

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  • 1
    @Kurumi- Do Windows programmes such as Winzip or 7-zip recognise .zip files?
    – Tony
    Mar 29, 2011 at 1:45
  • 1
    @Tony. I believe they do. I tested the 7-zip linux version with zip and able to extract. If you want, there is also GNU zip for windows.
    – kurumi
    Mar 29, 2011 at 2:06
  • You lose zgrep, zcmp, zdiff and all sorts of tools that can work on pipes by your choice of a non-streamable format called zip. Power users use pipes.
    – Tankman六四
    Nov 14, 2018 at 3:39
  • This does not answer the question. This answer tells the OP to use zip which creates ZIP files, not .gz files.
    – xdevs23
    Aug 20, 2023 at 18:51
116

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

tar cvzf cvd.tar.gz cvd*.txt

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

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

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

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    if you name the file with the extension .tgz, (short for tar gz), then Windows programs will recognize it as something that winzip etc can process as is. Congrats to SiegeX for your 10K!
    – shellter
    Mar 29, 2011 at 1:29
36

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 transparently. gzip is designed as a complement to tar, not as a replacement

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16

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.

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    The switch is actually 'z' ('x' is for extract). Nice you mentioned 'j'/bzip2 - much tighter compression.
    – Tony Delroy
    Mar 29, 2011 at 2:09
7

You can do it using:

zip my_final_filename.zip my_first_file my_second_file ... my_last_file

unzip my_final_filename.gz

or

tar cvzf my_final_filename.tar.gz my_first_file my_second_file ... my_last_file

tar -czvf my_final_filename.tar.gz

Unfortunately gzip is not capable of doing that. In case of more information please look at comments.

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  • I don't think your first command works. At least generally. If it works for a particular shell you should indicate it. I'd downvote if I had enough rep.
    – DPM
    Feb 17, 2019 at 16:41
  • @DPM is right, the gzip/gunzip commands didn't work, it will return the error gzip: my_final_filename.gz: No such file or directory
    – Bilal
    Jun 20, 2019 at 9:41
  • DPM and Bilal are right. Gzip is not capable of compressing multiple files into one. Look at this thread under Melebius answer: askubuntu.com/questions/1103018/gzip-2-files-into-one-file I edit my answer now.
    – Vahid F
    Dec 7, 2019 at 7:58
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To compress multiple files with different patterns, we could this :

tar -czvf deploy.tar.gz **/Alice*.yml **/Bob*.json

this will add all .yml files that starts with Alice from any sub-directory and add all .json files that starts with Bob from any sub-directory.

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