How to open a .gz file?

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to view a compressed .tif map from the US Geological Survey. It downloads as a large .gz file They say to use gZip from gzip.org. It is a self extracting file. When I unzip it I do get a gZip executable but it doesn’t do much. It is an odd shaped icon, It is an old MS-Dos file.

WinZip is supposed to open .gz but doesn’t seems to be freeware. There has to be a decent .gz decoder somewhere.

Dennis

2

that probably came from a Unix/Linux system. 7-zip should be able to open it.

edit: link.

it’s all I use any more. forget WinZip.

3

The page at gzip.org is quite out of date, but if you read further on it, it actually recommends 7-zip or WinZip for extracting its files on Windows.

4

Doesn’t Windows come with a built-in utility for unzipping files? I’d be surprised if it doesn’t, at least, and surprised in turn if it can’t handle a format as common as gz.

5

The advantage of 7-zip over plain gzip is that 7-zip will open a bunch of ZIP formats, including gzip, while the latter only uncompresses gzipped files. 7-zip also smoothly integrates with the Windows Explorer and is free.

Windows does ship with a bunch of command-line utilities; perhaps one of them understands .gz?

6

And the answer to these questions is no - Windows supports ZIP (as in pkZip archives) and their own CAB format archives, but not gz

7

That’s a console application. Sounds like you’re just double clicking the .exe file. Bring up a cmd prompt and run it from there.

8

The usage is



gzip -dk myfile.gz

This will decompress myfile.gz into a new file “myfile” (the same name with the “.gz” extension removed).

This assumes gzip is in a directory in your PATH, and you have done a cd into the directory containing myfile.gz.