Copyright © 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software—to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances.
It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice.
This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and “any later version”, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.
To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.
one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does.
Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:
Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome
to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c'
for details.
The hypothetical commands show w and show c should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than show w and show c; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items—whatever suits your program.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a “copyright disclaimer” for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.
signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.
gzip reduces the size of the named files using Lempel-Ziv coding
(LZ77). Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the
extension .gz, while keeping the same ownership modes, access and
modification times. (The default extension is -gz for VMS,
z for MSDOS, OS/2 FAT and Atari.) If no files are specified or
if a file name is "-", the standard input is compressed to the standard
output. gzip will only attempt to compress regular files. In
particular, it will ignore symbolic links.
If the new file name is too long for its file system, gzip
truncates it. gzip attempts to truncate only the parts of the
file name longer than 3 characters. (A part is delimited by dots.) If
the name consists of small parts only, the longest parts are truncated.
For example, if file names are limited to 14 characters, gzip.msdos.exe
is compressed to gzi.msd.exe.gz. Names are not truncated on systems
which do not have a limit on file name length.
By default, gzip keeps the original file name and timestamp in
the compressed file. These are used when decompressing the file with the
-N option. This is useful when the compressed file name was
truncated or when the time stamp was not preserved after a file
transfer.
Compressed files can be restored to their original form using gzip -d
or gunzip or zcat. If the original name saved in the
compressed file is not suitable for its file system, a new name is
constructed from the original one to make it legal.
gunzip takes a list of files on its command line and replaces
each file whose name ends with .gz, .z, .Z,
-gz, -z or _z and which begins with the correct
magic number with an uncompressed file without the original extension.
gunzip also recognizes the special extensions .tgz and
.taz as shorthands for .tar.gz and .tar.Z
respectively. When compressing, gzip uses the .tgz
extension if necessary instead of truncating a file with a .tar
extension.
gunzip can currently decompress files created by gzip,
zip, compress or pack. The detection of the input
format is automatic. When using the first two formats, gunzip
checks a 32 bit CRC (cyclic redundancy check). For pack,
gunzip checks the uncompressed length. The compress format
was not designed to allow consistency checks. However gunzip is
sometimes able to detect a bad .Z file. If you get an error when
uncompressing a .Z file, do not assume that the .Z file is
correct simply because the standard uncompress does not complain.
This generally means that the standard uncompress does not check
its input, and happily generates garbage output. The SCO compress
-H format (lzh compression method) does not include a CRC but
also allows some consistency checks.
Files created by zip can be uncompressed by gzip only if
they have a single member compressed with the 'deflation' method. This
feature is only intended to help conversion of tar.zip files to
the tar.gz format. To extract zip files with several
members, use unzip instead of gunzip.
zcat is identical to gunzip -c. zcat
uncompresses either a list of files on the command line or its standard
input and writes the uncompressed data on standard output. zcat
will uncompress files that have the correct magic number whether they
have a .gz suffix or not.
gzip uses the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used in zip and PKZIP.
The amount of compression obtained depends on the size of the input and
the distribution of common substrings. Typically, text such as source
code or English is reduced by 60-70%. Compression is generally much
better than that achieved by LZW (as used in compress), Huffman
coding (as used in pack), or adaptive Huffman coding
(compact).
Compression is always performed, even if the compressed file is slightly
larger than the original. The worst case expansion is a few bytes for
the gzip file header, plus 5 bytes every 32K block, or an expansion
ratio of 0.015% for large files. Note that the actual number of used
disk blocks almost never increases. gzip preserves the mode,
ownership and timestamps of files when compressing or decompressing.
Here are some realistic examples of running gzip.
This is the output of the command gzip -h:
gzip 1.2.4 (18 Aug 93)
usage: gzip [-cdfhlLnNrtvV19] [-S suffix] [file ...]
-c --stdout write on standard output, keep original files unchanged
-d --decompress decompress
-f --force force overwrite of output file and compress links
-h --help give this help
-l --list list compressed file contents
-L --license display software license
-n --no-name do not save or restore the original name and time stamp
-N --name save or restore the original name and time stamp
-q --quiet suppress all warnings
-r --recursive operate recursively on directories
-S .suf --suffix .suf use suffix .suf on compressed files
-t --test test compressed file integrity
-v --verbose verbose mode
-V --version display version number
-1 --fast compress faster
-9 --best compress better
file... files to (de)compress. If none given, use standard input.
This is the output of the command gzip -v texinfo.tex:
texinfo.tex: 71.6% -- replaced with texinfo.tex.gz
The following command will find all gzip files in the current
directory and subdirectories, and extract them in place without
destroying the original:
find . -name '*.gz' -print | sed 's/^\(.*\)[.]gz$/gunzip < "&" > "\1"/' | sh
gzip
The format for running the gzip program is:
gzip option ...
gzip supports the following options:
gzip, and if the option --stdout is also
given, copy the input data without change to the standard output: let
zcat behave as cat. If -f is not given, and
when not running in the background, gzip prompts to verify
whether an existing file should be overwritten.
compressed size: size of the compressed file
uncompressed size: size of the uncompressed file
ratio: compression ratio (0.0% if unknown)
uncompressed_name: name of the uncompressed file
The uncompressed size is given as -1 for files not in gzip
format, such as compressed .Z files. To get the uncompressed size for
such a file, you can use:
zcat file.Z | wc -c
In combination with the --verbose option, the following fields are also displayed:
method: compression method (deflate,compress,lzh,pack)
crc: the 32-bit CRC of the uncompressed data
date & time: time stamp for the uncompressed file
The crc is given as ffffffff for a file not in gzip format.
With --verbose, the size totals and compression ratio for all files
is also displayed, unless some sizes are unknown. With --quiet,
the title and totals lines are not displayed.
gzip license then quit.
gzip
suffix from the compressed file name) and do not restore the original
time stamp if present (copy it from the compressed file). This option
is the default when decompressing.
gzip will descend
into the directory and compress all the files it finds there (or
decompress them in the case of gunzip).
gunzip -S "" * (*.* for MSDOS)
Previous versions of gzip used the .z suffix. This was changed to
avoid a conflict with pack.
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.
The environment variable GZIP can hold a set of default options for
gzip. These options are interpreted first and can be overwritten by
explicit command line parameters. For example:
for sh: GZIP="-8v --name"; export GZIP
for csh: setenv GZIP "-8v --name"
for MSDOS: set GZIP=-8v --name
On Vax/VMS, the name of the environment variable is GZIP_OPT, to
avoid a conflict with the symbol set for invocation of the program.
gzip on tapes
When writing compressed data to a tape, it is generally necessary to pad
the output with zeroes up to a block boundary. When the data is read and
the whole block is passed to gunzip for decompression,
gunzip detects that there is extra trailing garbage after the
compressed data and emits a warning by default. You have to use the
--quiet option to suppress the warning. This option can be set in the
GZIP environment variable, as in:
for sh: GZIP="-q" tar -xfz --block-compress /dev/rst0
for csh: (setenv GZIP "-q"; tar -xfz --block-compress /dev/rst0)
In the above example, gzip is invoked implicitly by the -z
option of GNU tar. Make sure that the same block size (-b
option of tar) is used for reading and writing compressed data on
tapes. (This example assumes you are using the GNU version of
tar.)
If you find a bug in gzip, please send electronic mail to
bug-gzip@gnu.org. Include the version number,
which you can find by running gzip -V. Also include in your
message the hardware and operating system, the compiler used to compile
gzip,
a description of the bug behavior, and the input to gzip that triggered
the bug.