How do I gunzip to a destination directory other than the current one?
This did not work:
gunzip *.gz /putthemhere/
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3 Answers
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Ask gunzip to output to standard output and redirect to a file in that directory:
gunzip -c file.gz > /THERE/file
zcat is a shortcut for gunzip -c.
If you want to gunzip multiple files iterate over all files:
for f in *.gz; do
STEM=$(basename "${f}" .gz)
gunzip -c "${f}" > /THERE/"${STEM}"
done
(here basename is used to get the part of the filename without the extension)
Benjamin Bannier
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4Creates the file, but does not preserve file ownership, permissions etc. That may be good or bad depending on your precise situation. – Chris Johnson Nov 09 '14 at 17:12
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how to gunzip to different location alongwith deleting the original file? – kaushal agrawal Jan 07 '20 at 13:25
4
If you need to extract a single file and write into a root-owned directory, then use sudo tee:
zcat filename.conf.gz | sudo tee /etc/filename.conf >/dev/null
If the file is coming from a remote source (i.e., ssh, curl https, etc), you can do it like this:
ssh remoteserver cat filename.conf.gz | zcat | sudo tee /etc/filename.conf >/dev/null
(Note that these examples only work for a single file, unlike the example *.gz, which is all gzipped files in the directory.)
Paul
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fatal_error
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For writing with root privileges, `sudo tee $filename >/dev/null` is a little more idiomatic than using `dd`. – dcoles Nov 17 '18 at 21:17
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1@Toto @AulisRonkainen You should've approved [this suggested edit](https://superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/1127854). The answerer, in their 2018-11-21 edit, meant to edit their answer to say `sudo tee` instead of `sudo dd`. The answerer replaced two instances, but it seems they just forgot to edit that part in the aforementioned suggested edit. – galacticninja Jun 26 '22 at 04:28
