Unzip 40k+ .gz files using terminal

Question

I have downloaded log files from a GCP bucket, that I need to parse in a later task. But for now, the files are compressed and are over 40k .gz files. I tried few commands and none of them worked:

find . -prune -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip {} +

find . -type f -exec gunzip {} +

Any idea how I can unzip that number of files using the cmd, I am using Bash on Mac.

You have almost done it. Just drop the `-prune`: `find . -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip {} +` — M. Nejat Aydin, Aug 31 '22 at 08:29
@JamesRisner the comment to this question was the answer to my problem. But thank you for answering anyways — toh19, Oct 18 '22 at 20:17

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 20 '22 at 02:07

An optimization you can do is to allow more than one file per gunzip:

find . -type f -name \*.gz -print0 | xargs -0 gunzip

This scans all directories from the current directory and below.
locating all regular files (-type f) with a .gz file name ending.
Piping the output to another command (xargs) null (\0) terminated.
The xargs reads null terminate input (-0).
The calling gunzip with as many file names as can fit on the command line.

Unzip 40k+ .gz files using terminal

1 Answers1