zcat

Name

zcat -- uncompress files to standard output

Description

The zcat utility shall behave as described in POSIX 1003.1-2001 (ISO/IEC 9945-2003), with differences listed below.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard requires that if zcat exists, it must be a symbolic or hard link to /bin/gzip. This specification additionally allows zcat to be a wrapper script which calls gzip -c -d.

Differences

The zcat utility shall write to standard output the uncompressed form of files that have been compressed using any of the compression methods supported by the gzip utility. It is the equivalent of gzip -c -d. Input files are not affected.