Shell Script : Join small gzipped files into larger files without unzipping them

I have some 8000 gz files of around 60MB each. I want to merge them into few larger files. So how to do it in a bash scriptwithout unzipping them ? Shell script may take input as new-file-size or number of files to combine. For example say I have 1.gz, 2.gz, 3.gz ... 10.gzNow I need one file per say 3 files, so now 1.gz, 2.gz and 3.gz will combine into 1_new.gz and so on.

Answer：

It is possible to concatinate gziped files together, however when yougunzip the resulting file you'll get a single stream, see the gzip manual for reference. A script would be similar to Ansgar Wiechers's one for tar: #!/bin/bash maxnum=$1 i=1 j=0 for f in *.gz; do cat $f >> archive_$j.gz i=$((i+1)) if [ $i -eq $maxnum ]; then i=1 j=$((j+1)) fi done Note that the above code is untested. If you want to archive things properly tar is a better solution, but if all you want to do is concatinate a number of files which have beengziped then such a concatination as this is good.