First released on 31st October 1992, GZ is an archive file format that is effectively brought in use to usually compress and decompress single or multiple files. It is most commonly used on Unix operation systems.For extensive use, the compressed archives are formulated by putting together a collection of files in a single TAR archive followed by compressing the archive with GZ. The resultant file is referred to as tarball. Even though it is similar to the ZIP format, it must not be confused with it.