sh: uncompress: command not found

If you are uncompressing a program from a .bin file and you are working with a freshly installed Linux distro, you might receive the following error - sh: uncompress: command not found. This error might be a result of either the gunzip program is not installed on your system, or a proper link association with the compression application does not exist.

I will provide instruction on how to fix the latter first, because usually gunzip should be installed by default. To create the proper file linking we will use the ln command, which is used to create links to files. So, all you have to do is first make sure you are logged in as root, then run the following command:

ln -s /usr/bin/gunzip /usr/bin/uncompress

Once this has been done try running the command which generated the "sh: uncompress: command not found" error. I last encountered this error when I was installing the Valve Source gaming dedicated server - SRCDS, and I was executing the following command - ./hldsupdatetool.bin.

Now, if gunzip is not installed on your system, just login as root and use yum or yast to do so. Below is how you can install gunzip using yum.

yum install gzip