Both ZLib and GZip were written by the same people... Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Alder.

GZip and ZLib are both compression software that utilize the DEFLATE algorythm. GZip and ZLib are similar but not exactly the same... they have different headers.

GZip is mostly used for stand alone, one file at a time, archieves... it makes the famous gz file extention.

ZLib is use in Tarballing

The file format is pretty simple... gzip encapsulates the output from DEFLATE and adds some extra file information like

   ...and...
• The file name (pretty important)
• The original file permissions
• The files original date
• a checksum at the end of the file for integrety verification.

These are a few of the common switches used with gzip:

Switch	Description
-c	Stream output to the console leaving the file unchanged.
-d	Decompress the archieve.
-h	Help
-l	List the contents of the archieve.
-r	Recursive.
-t	Test the file integrity.

gzip MyStats.txt gzip -d MyStats.txt.gz

To compress a file named MyStats.txt:

The output will be the archieve MyStats.txt.gz. The original file will be gone. This file is the original file.

To decompress the archieve:

The archieve is decompressed to its original state.