Subject: Re: Bug: error messages from gunzip
From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
To: John Docherty <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 10:51:58 -0700
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

> When running gunzip /nonexistent/*gz, the error message from gunzip is very misleading: gzip:  /nonexistent/*gz.gz: No such file or directory
> 
> It's misleadng in two ways:
> 
> 1. it refers to gzip, when I was running gunzip

Yes, gunzip merely calls "gzip -d", so the message is coming from from 
gzip which does what it does regardless of who calls it.

> 2. it refers to a file specification that I did not provide, by naively appending .gz to the file spec

Yes, that's what gzip -d does: if you say "gzip -d foo" it wants to 
decompress foo.gz because "foo" doesn't end in ".gz". In your case the 
file name was "/nonexistent/*gz" and since that doesn't end in ".gz" it 
looked for "/nonexistent/*gz.gz" and didn't find it.

> Doubtless you have bigger fish to fry.

Yes, that sounds right. Closing the bug report.