zcat

zcat [options] [file ...]

zcat decompresses gzip-compressed files and writes the uncompressed data to standard output, similar to cat for regular files. It is equivalent to gunzip -c or gzip -dc.zcat can decompress files created by gzip, zip, compress, or pack. It recognizes compressed files by their magic number, not just the .gz extension, allowing decompression of files with non-standard names.When reading from stdin, zcat will pass through data that is not in a recognized compressed format unchanged (acting like cat).

-f, --force

Force decompression even if file has multiple links or the suffix does not match.

Suppress all warning messages.

Display filename and compression ratio for each file.

Display help message and exit.

Display version information and exit.

zcat only outputs to stdout; it cannot decompress files in place. For decompressing to files, use gunzip or gzip -d. On some systems (e.g., macOS), zcat may be installed as gzcat to avoid conflicts with the compress utility's zcat. Unlike gzip/gunzip, zcat does not support flags like -t (test), -l (list), -k (keep), or -r (recursive) since it only reads and decompresses to stdout.

zcat is part of the gzip package, originally written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. gzip was first released in 1992 as a free replacement for the Unix compress utility, which was encumbered by patents on the LZW algorithm. The gzip package became a GNU project and is now a standard utility on Unix-like systems.

gzip(1), gunzip(1), cat(1), zless(1), zgrep(1), bzcat(1), xzcat(1)