gzip meaning

Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler developed gzip(GNU Project) as a replacement for compress, the format used in earlier versions of Unix and Linux.

Gzip make reduction in size of data to save storage space or increase the data transfer rate. Gzip is most often used to compress web pages on the server end for decompression in the browser.

Although its file format also allows for multiple such streams to be concatenated (zipped files are simply decompressed concatenated as if they were originally one file^[3]), gzip is normally used to compress just single files.^[4] Compressed archives are typically created by assembling collections of files into a single tar archive, and then compressing that archive with gzip. The final .tar.gz or .tgz file is usually called a tarball.

When gzip is invoked as gunzip, it decompresses the data (a file or stdin). gunzip is equivalent to gzip -d.

When gzip is invoked as zcat, it also decompresses the data, but behaves similarly to cat. It decompresses individual files and concatenates them to standard output. zcat is equivalent to gzip -d -c.

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