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So I tried to make a gzipped backup of my entire directory structure, but I inadvertently issued the command gzip -r ./, hoping to add all files and folders to a single gzip archive.

This obviously is very wrong, but before I had time to quit, it gzipped each of my files individually (recursively) and deleted the original. Now I have a file structure that is completely made up of gzipped files. Does anyone know the command to undo what I have done (ie. extract the gzip file in place and then delete the gzip file)?

Edit: Credit to Greg, gunzip -r ./' solved it!

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    this is probably close: find -type f -name '*.gz' | xargs gunzip
    – Frank Farmer
    Commented Jun 3, 2011 at 23:02
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    Did you try gunzip -r ./?
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented Jun 3, 2011 at 23:03
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    Heh. But make sure to make a backup copy first this time. It's generally harder to undo an undo gone oops than the initial oops.
    – pst
    Commented Jun 3, 2011 at 23:06
  • I moved my comment to an answer, since it solved your problem.
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented Jun 4, 2011 at 0:00
  • In the future, if you want to make a gzipped backup of your entire filesystem, use tar czf backup.tar.gz /.
    – Patches
    Commented Jun 4, 2011 at 1:29

1 Answer 1

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To undo this, use the opposite command:

gunzip -r ./

Note that the original gzip command will skip over files that already have a .gz suffix, because there's no point in compressing them twice. However, the above gunzip command will decompress such files, because it doesn't know that gzip skipped them.

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    Good point - that might be an argument for using the find idea with -cmin (or -ctime if it's been days ago) as an additional qualifier so as to avoid unzipping what originally were gz files at the time of the accidental command.
    – Chris Stratton
    Commented Jun 4, 2011 at 0:13

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