Extract .GZ Files Online
(No Size Limits)

A .gz file holds one compressed file and nothing else. Gzip has no concept of folders or multiple entries, so access.log.gz decompresses to exactly one access.log. If you were expecting a folder full of files, what you have is almost certainly a .tar.gz, where TAR does the bundling before gzip compresses the result.

The difference that confuses everyone

This is the single most common misunderstanding with Unix archives, and it comes from ZIP. A .zip file is both a bundle and a compressor at once, so people reasonably assume .gz is the same thing. It is not. Gzip only compresses a stream of bytes, and it neither knows nor cares whether those bytes were one file or a thousand.

That is why the Unix world stacks two formats: TAR turns many files into one stream, gzip compresses that stream. Two jobs, two tools, two extensions on the end of the filename.

Where .gz files come from

Rotated server logs, database dumps, single large data files, and anything a script compressed on the way out. It is the format you meet when a machine produced the file rather than a person.

Windows has never opened .gz without help. macOS and Linux both handle it natively, and ChromeOS does not.

How large a .gz can be

There is no ceiling. The file is decompressed as a stream and written out as it decodes, so memory use stays flat regardless of the result size. A multi-gigabyte log file decompresses the same way a small one does, which matters because .gz files are frequently very large by the time anyone needs to open one.

Doing it from a terminal instead

To decompress while keeping the compressed original:

gunzip -k access.log.gz

To read a compressed log without decompressing it to disk at all:

zcat access.log.gz | less

What does not work

Multi-volume archives split across several files are not supported. Gzip has no encryption layer of its own, so a password-protected .gz is really an encrypted container holding one, and that outer layer has to come off first.