.GZ File

File extension gz is used for GNU GZIP compressed archives, a standard archive format used on Unix/Linux based computers.

There are several versions of this format, but the original was based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. It was first introduced in 1993.

MIME types:
application/x-compressed
application/x-gzip

Files with gz extension are archives saved in the GZIP (GNU ZIP) compression archive format.

How to open:

Nowadays most modern compression utilities are able to open and extract *.gz files.

How to convert:

The easiest way how to convert *.gz files is to extract them and compress them again to another format such as RAR.