Unable to create a *.gz archieve

Question

Trying to create a .gz archive - my_gz.gz - and add multiple files to it:

  $ gzip my_gz.gz file1.txt file12.txt

  gzip: can't stat: my_gz.gz: No such file or directory

Answer 1

You cannot add multiple files using gzip because it is only a compression program, not an archiver. To compress multiple files, you would want to use tar with gzip:

tar czf archive.tar.gz file1.txt file2.txt

The z tells the archiver to automatically use gzip for compression. You could also tell it to use different compression algorithm. See the tar(1) manual page for more information on this.