将.gz文件从子文件夹解压缩（递归）到根文件夹中

Question

Here is the situation : I have a folder, containing a lot of subfolders, some of them containing .gz compressed files (NOT tar, just compressed text files). I want to recursively decompress all these .gz files into the root folder, but I can't figure out the exact way to do it.

I have my folders like that : /folderX/subfolder1/file.gz

by using

gzip -c -d -r *.gz

I can probably extract all the files at once, but they will remain in their respective subfolders. I want them all in /folderX/

find -name *.gz

gives me the correct list of the files I am looking for, but I have no idea how to combine the 2 commands. Should I combine these commands in a script ? Or is there a functionality of gzip that I have missed allowing to decompress everything in the folder from which you are executing the command ?

Thanks for the help !

Answer 1

You can use a while..done loop that iterate the input:

find dirname -name *.gz|while read i; do gzip -c -d -r $i; done

You can also use xargs, with the additional benefit of dealing with spaces (" ") in the file name of parameter -0:

find dirname -name '*.gz' -print0 | xargs -0 -L 1 gzip -c -d -r

The "-print0" output all the files found separated by NULL character. The -0 switch of xargs rebuild the list parsing the NULL character and applies the "gzip..." command to each of them. Pay attention to the "-L 1" parameter which tells xargs to pass only ONE file at a time to gzip.