I have an Amazon EC2 instance running CentOs. Unfortunately I don't have a gui. I tried setting up x11 forwarding but apparently it works differently with Ubuntu than it does with CentOs. But thats not the point. I download a pretty large .gz file (8.7Gb) and extracted using the following command:
gzip -d [filename] &
it took nearly an hour to decompress, and using ls -l I could see that the uncompressed directory was going to be nearly 30 gb. Anyway the process finishes and when I ls again the directory is no where to be found. I tried ls -a as well but still nothing. Any thoughts on this?
This sounds like gzip is silently failing when it runs out of space. How large is your instance's EBS volume / local disk that you're unzipping onto? (run df -h and figure out which device you're unzipping in.)
Additionally you could try to run gzip in verbose mode to catch any errors it might not be showing. I don't have a CentOS machine handy, but you might be able to use gzip -l [filename] to figure out whether your file is too big for the target directory.