unix - zcat won't unzip files properly

Question

I need to unzip a compressed file on the fly in my program. It works when I try it on my own linux computer, but for some reason the school computers fail whenever I tell them to do it. To unzip I'm using the following command:

 zcat /file/address/file.tar.gz

and get the error:

 /file/address/file.tar.gz.Z: No such file or directory

I tried looking through the documentation but couldn't find a flag to turn off this odd behavior.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/296717/zcat-wont-unzip-files-properly

Answer 1

Your school's system still has the old "compress" style utilities rather than the newer GNU "gzip" based ones.

You need to use gzcat rather than zcat, assuming that it's available.