Bill,
To answer your question, your operating system certainly won't let you take more space than your hard drive has available, your gunzip will simply fail. AFAIK, theres no harm in attempting.
However, gunzip on linux has an option -l or --list that will display the uncompressed as well as the compressed size of the file. You can then check the free space on your hard drive and see if you'll have enough space to store the decompressed file.
Also, gunzip will delete the old gzip file once its decompressed, however as I understand it, you still need enough free space to store both the compressed and decompressed version since it only releases the compressed version after it is fully decompressed (can anyone affirm or refute this?).
Hopefully this answers your question.
-Ryan
William L. Jarrold wrote:
Hi,
I want to unzip a whole mess of *.gz files via gunzip on my iBook. I don't know how big the whole mess will be once unzipped. I am told that it is a very very bad thing to fill up ones filesystem (sorry, a computer scientist I am not, so this may seem like a dumb question.) So my question is this: if I do this mother-of-gunzippings do I risk filling up my filesystem and thus ruining my computer OR does the gunzipping process know to stop when things get close to being full?
Well,
Bill
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