GZip an entire directory

Question

i used the following:

gzip -9 -c -r <some_directory> > directory.gz

how do i decompress this directory ?

I have tried

gunzip directory.gz  

i am just left with a single file and not a directory structure.

Answer 1

As others have already mentioned, gzip is a file compression tool and not an archival tool. It cannot work with directories. When you run it with -r, it will find all files in a directory hierarchy and compress them, i.e. replacing path/to/file with path/to/file.gz. When you pass -c the gzip output is written to stdout instead of creating files. You have effectively created one big file which contains several gzip-compressed files.

Now, you could look for the gzip file header/magic number, which is 1f8b and then reconstruct your files manually.

The sensible thing to do now is to create backups (if you haven't already). Backups always help (especially with problems such as yours). Create a backup of your directory.gz file now. Then read on.

Fortunately, there's an easier way than manually reconstructing all files: using binwalk, a forensics utility which can be used to extract files from within other files. I tried it with a test file, which was created the same way as yours. Running binwalk -e file.gz will create a folder with all extracted files. It even manages to reconstruct the original file names. The hierarchy of the directories is probably lost. But at least you have your file contents and their names back. Good luck!

Remember: backups are essential.

(For completeness' sake: What you probably intended to run: tar czf directory.tar.gz directory and then tar xf directory.tar.gz)

Answer 2

gzip will compress 1+ files, though not meant to function like an archive utility. The posted cmd-line would yield N compressed file images concatenated to stdout, redirected to the named output file; unfortunately stuff like filenames and any dirs would not be recorded. A pair like this should work:

(create)

tar -czvf dir.tar.gz <some-dir>

(extract)

tar -xzvf dir.tar.gz