I have a certain file named tmp.gz. When I try to decompress it using gzip -d, I get an error-message that it has multiple entries:

$ gzip -d tmp.gz
gzip: tmp.gz has more than one entry -- unchanged

$ gzip -d < tmp.gz > tmp
gzip: stdin has more than one entry--rest ignored

(And I get the same errors, of course, with gunzip instead of gzip -d.)

So, how do I decompress it and get all the files?

2 Answers

As explained by 'druuna' at , this can happen if it's actually a ZIP-file rather than a gz-file, just with a misleading extension, and it contains multiple files. (gzip -d does support ZIP-files that contain only one file.)

In my case, that's exactly right:

$ file tmp.gz
tmp.gz: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

and using unzip rather than gzip -d worked perfectly.

2

sudo unzip file.zip

Sometimes you don't have sufficient rights to unzip. Maybe write permission missing?

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