On Linux, gzip is unable to compress a folder, it used to compress a single file only. To compress a folder, you should use tar + gzip , which is tar -z .

How do you Gunzip all files in a directory?

gunzip has -r option. From man gunzip : -r –recursive Travel the directory structure recursively. If any of the file names specified on the command line are directories, gzip will descend into the directory and compress all the files it finds there (or decompress them in the case of gunzip ).

How use Gunzip command in Linux?

Decompressing Files with gunzip

The general syntax for the gunzip command is as follows: gunzip [OPTION]… [FILE]… On most Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian, gunzip is a bash script wrapper to the gzip -d command.