Concatenate gzipped files

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Files compressed by gzip can be directly concatenated into larger gzipped files.

cat file1.gz file2.gz file3.gz > combined.gz

This is a property of gzip that is less efficient than concatenating the input files and gzipping the result:

cat file1 file2 file3 | gzip > combined.gz

A complete demonstration:

echo 'Hello world!' > hello.txt
echo 'Howdy world!' > howdy.txt
gzip hello.txt 
gzip howdy.txt

cat hello.txt.gz howdy.txt.gz > greetings.txt.gz

gunzip greetings.txt.gz

cat greetings.txt

Which results in

Hello world!
Howdy world!

Notice that greetings.txt.gz is a single file and is decompressed as the single file greeting.txt. Contrast this with tar -czf hello.txt howdy.txt > greetings.tar.gz, which keeps the files separate inside the tarball.

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