How to decompress only a portion of a file? I have a large, repetitive text file. It compresses very well - it's about 3MB compressed. However, if decompressed, it takes 1.7GB. Since it's repetitive, I only need a fraction of the output to check the contents of the file. It was compressed using `gzip`. Does `gunzip` provides any way to only decompress the first few megs of a file?

You could decompress to standard output and feed it through something like `head` to only capture a bit of it:


gunzip -c file.gz | head -c 20M >file.part


The `-c` flag to `head` requires the `head` implementation that is provided by GNU coreutils.

`dd` may also be used:


gunzip -c file.gz | dd of=file.part bs=1M count=20


Both of these pipelines will copy the first 20 MiB of the uncompressed file to `file.part`.