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unixcommand-linearchiveunzipzcat

zcat won't unzip files properly

I need to unzip a compressed file on the fly in my program. It works when I try it on my own linux computer, but for some reason the school computers fail whenever I tell them to do it. To unzip I'm using the following command:

 zcat /file/address/file.tar.gz

and get the error:

 /file/address/file.tar.gz.Z: No such file or directory

I tried looking through the documentation but couldn't find a flag to turn off this odd behavior.

Solution

  • Your school's system still has the old "compress" style utilities rather than the newer GNU "gzip" based ones.

    You need to use gzcat rather than zcat, assuming that it's available.