Multiple compressed files can be concatenated. In this case,
gunzip will extract all members at once. If one member is
damaged, other members might still be recovered after removal of the
damaged member. Better compression can be usually obtained if all
members are decompressed and then recompressed in a single step.
This is an example of concatenating gzip files:
gzip -c file1 > foo.gz gzip -c file2 >> foo.gz
Then
gunzip -c foo
is equivalent to
cat file1 file2
In case of damage to one member of a ‘.gz’ file, other members can still be recovered (if the damaged member is removed). However, you can get better compression by compressing all members at once:
cat file1 file2 | gzip > foo.gz
compresses better than
gzip -c file1 file2 > foo.gz
If you want to recompress concatenated files to get better compression, do:
zcat old.gz | gzip > new.gz
If a compressed file consists of several members, the uncompressed size and CRC reported by the --list option applies to the last member only. If you need the uncompressed size for all members, you can use:
zcat file.gz | wc -c
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.