UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Gurus,

My own stupidity (or ignorance...or both) put me in the situation I am in and I need help please:

1-My shell account (OS: HP UX v11) contains several work directories (/docs, /scripts...)
2-Our sysadmin has implemented aggressive disk quotas so I have to compress the files I put here to avoid running out of space.
3-I decided to teach myself how to use GZIP and, w/o thinking about trying it on a "dummy" file first, I did

>gzip -v9 -S .suf *.doc

on the 50 some files on my /docs directory. My files are all now successfully compressed with a "<filename>.doc.suf" suffix.

4-How do I de-compress those now? I have tried
>gzip -d -S .suf *doc
I get "unknown suffix -- ignored" 50 times

5-Same error msg if I try
>gzip -d *.suf OR
>gzip -d -S .suf *.doc OR
>gzip -d *.doc

I put myself in this stupid situation because of my carelessness. What am I do wrong here? Which syntax should I use? PLEASE HELP!!!

Al.

gzip -v9 -S .suf *.doc

says that the suffiz to use is .suf and the files to compress are *.doc. After that is finished you will have files that end in .doc.suf but for our purposes, the gzip suffix is .suf. That was a mistake, don't use -S. Let gzip pick its own suffix.

To decompess the result you need
gzip -d -S .suf <filelist>

where <filelist> is the list of files that you would like to decompress. To completely reverse what you did:
gzip -d -S .suf *.doc.suf

This may pick up a few files the were pre-existing with a name that ends in .doc.suf if you had any. But gzip will complain and move on to the next file.

And rather than "gzip -d", most of us would do "gunzip".

IT WORKS! THANK YOU!

Okay, I am calm now but you have saved my behind so thank you!

Al.