Unzipping all .gz files in all subdirectories
 

I was trying to make a backup of my system last night and I screwed up the gzip command and ended up compressing over half the files in my system. :rolleyes: I was able to 'gunzip *.gz' to my /bin and most of my /etc so I can boot but there are still a lot of .gz files in /usr and others. Is there a way to go through all subdirectories and gunzip all files ended in .gz? Or maybe even exclude all the one's with .tar.gz?
Thanks,

If that looks fine, take the 'echo' word away so it actually runs those commands instead of printing them to the screen.

Ok, I tried that but it would only list the files in my current directory so I made the slight change to "find / -name '*.gz' | grep -v tar.gz | xargs -n1 echo gunzip" The command then will list all the files so I took out the echo before gunzip and it will list the .gz file followed by "is not a directory or a regular file - ignored" How do I get it to unzip those files?

Have you spaces in the files or directories?
If so, should do it.

Does running one gunzip command manually work?

maybe write a little script, I've read gunzip doesn't take well to pipeing make sure to log in as su so no permission denied files come up.
for FILENAME in `find -name *tar.gz -print`
do
gunzip $FILENAME
done

Sorry it took me so long to reply, to ToniT: There aren't spaces and I get the same error with the new command and yes one gunzip command manually works. To slick_willie: Putting in a script simply printed out the gunzip command useage.
Thanks for all the help so far

The command with those grep -Zz stuff works fine for me. Strange.

I checked and the only files I have left that are .gz are in /usr/share/man, do these files need to be decompressed?

They are compressed in my system (debian) and I think the man can uncompress them on the fly when needed.

Maybe that's why it ignored some of the files. I got the system working, thanks for the help