gunzip all .gz files in directory

Question

I have a directory with plenty of .txt.gz files (where the names do not follow a specific pattern.)

What is the simplest way to gunzip them? I want to preserve their original names, so that they go from whatevz.txt.gz to whatevz.txt

Answer 1

How about just this?

$ gunzip *.txt.gz

gunzip will create a gunzipped file without the .gz suffix and remove the original file by default (see below for details). *.txt.gz will be expanded by your shell to all the files matching.

This last bit can get you into trouble if it expands to a very long list of files. In that case, try using find and -exec to do the job for you.

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From the man page gzip(1):

gunzip takes a list of files on its command line and  replaces  each  file
whose  name  ends  with  .gz, -gz, .z, -z, or _z (ignoring case) and which
begins with the correct magic number with an uncompressed file without the
original  extension.