Subject: bug#69788: zcat, zgrep and other (g)zutils' names

From: wrotycz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2024 21:05:22 +0100

zcat, z grep and other (g)zutils   Hello,  I noticed, not for the first time that zcat, zgrep and rest of the utils are ambiguously named. Neither gzip nor .gz does not begin with &#39;z&#39;. All other compressors call their utils by the name of extension, like xzcat, lzcat, zstdgrep and so on. This is more logical and less confusing.  To make things worse, *nix Compress produces .Z files and that could be using &#39;z&#39; as prefix for the names other its tools. It doesn&#39;t have ones but that&#39;s the point - it would be logical to use zcat for a compress&#39; tool name, and &#39;gzcat&#39; fo gzip cat tool.  And the last and not least, these zXXX names collide with zutils&#39; names, which are more &#39;generic&#39;, in a sense that they serve as a tools for many compressors, not only for gzip.   So, for the reasons mentioned above and to avoid confusion I propose to rename zcat, zgrep, etc., to gzcat, gzgrep, etc.  Hope you understand the request.   Regards  wrotycz