GZ-extension: what are these files and how to open them?

Let rarely, but still some users of computer systems encounter files that have a GZ-extension (sometimes - TGZ). Immediately the question arises: "Than to open them?". I do not want to upset the reader who uses the Windows-system to work, but in this environment the expediency of opening files of this type is reduced to absolute zero. And that's why.

What is a GZ extension?

For the first time, files with the GZ extension were introduced to the world in 1993, after the release of a utility for packing and unpacking data called GNU Zip, or abbreviated GZip. Actually, according to the combination of the first characters, the files processed by this program with the application of compression, and received their extension.

Probably, many have already realized that the application itself belongs to the category of so-called archivers, and the files created with it are ordinary archives. Here only there is one nuance. The matter is that such archives are used exclusively in UNIX-like systems (for example, Linux), and the utility is built-in by default in the operating system software environment. What is most interesting, this archiver is present not only in the Linux OS, but even in the "operating systems" of Mac OS X.

Of course, you can open files with GZ-extension in Windows (this will be discussed a little later), but here there is a natural question: is it worth it? After all decompressed data in most cases still can not be read in Windows-systems, although there is also a version of the program for Windows.

Algorithm for compressing and decompressing a file

Many people might think that the compression and decompression program (the GZip archiver) works in exactly the same way as the well-known WinZIP package. Nothing like this. Initially, the program was tested on the basis of its own algorithm called DEFLATE, which was initially built on a combination of two types of encodings - Huffman and LZ77.

As already clear, when you compress the required information to the main name, the suffix gz is added. However, this only applies to single files. The matter is that the program initially does not know how to work with several files, for example, by the type of the same application WinZIP or WinRAR. In other words, it is simply not possible to pack two or more data packets into one archive.

That's why that with compression, that when decompressing data the utility uses an additional TAR application. As a result, when creating archives on the output, we get not a file with the extension GZ, but an object with a double extension in the abridged version of TGZ (in some cases - .tar.gz). Simply put, the TAR utility first compresses several files into one, after which it is processed by the GZip application. And such a combination of actions, to put it mildly, is very inconvenient.

The same applies to unpacking the data. First, the main archive file is decompressed, and then all other objects are extracted using the additional TAR utility.

GZ extension: what to open?

Now a few words about the discovery of data of this type. Needless to say, you can use the "native" utility GZip that on UNIX-based systems, as in Windows.

But since we use Windows more, unpacking such archives is possible using the built-in WinZIP archiver. In addition, quite effective tools are such popular packages as WinRAR, 7-Zip, E-merge WinAce, Corel WinZIP (version 16 Pro), etc.

If it's a virus

As it often happens, sometimes some viruses are masked for archives of this type. As a rule, in most cases, the extension of the GZ virus replaces a similar one - GAZ, although today there are cases when malicious programs and codes enter the system in the form of a file with the original extension.

By the way, it's far from the fact that antiviruses designed for Windows work will be able to identify a potential threat. That's why you should be very careful when detecting suspicious objects, and also use powerful anti-virus scanners in the form of commercial programs, rather than free utilities like Avast, which are already capable of passing the usual threats to "Windu".

In an extreme case, such an object can be initially (before tearing) to scan some portable utility like KVRT for potential threats.

Conclusion

Here, in fact, and all that relates to the archives that have GZ-extension. Probably, many users already understood how to work with such data. But here you should immediately clarify the situation for yourself. Open such an archive, even in a Windows environment, you can, but why? After all, if it contained data related exclusively to UNIX-systems, then it will be impossible to work with them. As an example, you can look at the image file of the DMG, created in the "operating system" Mac OS X. You can easily extract the contents using the same UltraISO program or something else like that. But what do you do with the extracted data? This is also the case with the format GZ.

In principle, even if the user is working with Linux or Mac, it is much easier to install the same WinRAR, designed for a certain "operating system", and use the utility without using additional programs, as provided by the functioning of GZip and TAR applications. As they say, the economy of forces and time is obvious. So why create additional difficulties if you can use one package instead of two?