More than 30 years after its debut, GNU gzip receives fixes for bugs that have existed since the project’s earliest releases.
Considering the number of fixed bugs that have been “present since the beginning,” gzip-1.15 should be the best gzip ever. The release was announced overnight by gzip maintainer Jim Meyering in an email to the info-gnu mailing list and posted to the savannah.gnu.org website.
Gzip is the compression tool that’s included on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It’s been around since 1992, which means since before close to half of us were born.
According to Meyering, the new release includes 119 commits since 1.14 was released in April 2025, including the following bug fixes:
- gzip no longer can mistakenly remove the wrong file if some other process simultaneously renames a gzip destination’s ancestor.
- gzip -d no longer rejects PKZIP signatures, local header, and data descriptors. These can appear in well-formed streamed zip files.
- gzip diagnostics now quote file names containing unusual characters.
- A use of uninitialized memory on some malformed inputs has been fixed.
- A buffer overflow has been fixed when decompressing an .lzh file after decompressing a .Z file.
- When decompressing an .lzh file, the output is no longer corrupted when an internal bit buffer is not properly cleared.
- When decompressing an .lzh file after another .lzh file, the output is no longer corrupted by the previous file’s decoding table.
- gzip –synchronous no longer fails to synchronize unreadable parentdirectories on platforms like GNU/Linux that have O_PATH, or to synchronize any parent directories on platforms like FreeBSD that have O_SEARCH but not O_PATH.
- On old-fashioned or limited platforms lacking mktemp, gzexe, zdiff and znew no longer have a race when creating a temporary file.
In addition, Meyering points out some behavior changes that users will want to know about:
- gzip no longer insists on the “C” locale; instead, it follows the typical practice of using the locale specified by the environment. This change, which is needed for file name quoting, can affect the format of floating-point numbers output by gzip’s -l and -v options. Diagnostics are still in English, though.
- gzip -l now reports “-Inf%” instead of “0.0%” for the infinite compression ratio of an empty file.
- znew’s -P option is now ignored, with a warning. It was present only to improve performance, and its implementation had too many bugs to be worth supporting.
No longer supported platforms include FreeBSD 4.11 (2005), HP-UX 11.00 (1997), Minix 3.1.8 (2010), and MS-Windows 8.1 (2013).
More information and links for downloading are available on the GNU gzip website.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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