gunzip multiple files

Question

I have a directory where there are multiple folders, each of folder contains a .gz file. How can I unzip all of them at once?

My data looks like this

List of folders

A
B
C
D

In every of them there is file as

A
a.out.gz
B
b.out.gz
C
c.out.gz
D
d.out.gz

Answer 1

This uses gunzip to unzip all files in a folder and have the ending .out.gz

gunzip */*.out.gz

This will "loop"* through all folders that have a zipped file in them. Let me add an example:

A
a.out.gz
B
b.out.gz
C
c.out.gz
D
d.out.gz
E
e.out

Using the command above, a.out.gz b.out.gz c.out.gz d.out.gz will all get unzipped, but it won't touch e.out since it isn't zipped.

*this is called globbing or filename expansion. You might like to read some more about it here.

Answer 2

find . -type f -name "*.gz" -execdir gunzip {} \;

the execdir option to find causes 'find' to 'cd' into each directory in turn and run the exec command (gunzip in this case) and then 'cd' back to the cwd