[GNC] gunzip test.gnucash fails

[David G. Pickett]

Quick tutorial on OS file name extensions (suffixes) and file type: While '.gz' tells your OS it needs to go to gunzip to be uncompressed into a file without the '.gz', gunzip does not care about the name.  To bypass the OS extension association, you can force the input and output file names using command line I/O redirection: gunzip < input_file > output_file.  Since gunzip reads from standard input file descriptor 0 by default, and write to standard output file descriptor 1 by default, it will gladly uncompress your gnucash data into an editable xml text file.  Of course, it has to like the taste of the file it reads!  :D  You can even name the output_file as some_base_name.txt so you text editor will gladly open and write it.

As to editing XML, as long as you only modify the strings inside <entity_tag ...>...</entity_tag> , and not any punctuation, like the fragment below where it says '<cmdty:quote_source>alphavantage</cmdty:quote_source>' you could change 'alphavantage' to another source, if you know the *exact* string for that source.  Change one the slow way to see what the magic word is!  The second example is a description <trn:description>IRC</trn:description> where you can change 'IRC' to whatever pleases you, but try not to stick anything funny or huge in there!
<gnc:commodity version="2.0.0">  <cmdty:space>AMEX</cmdty:space>  <cmdty:id>DIA</cmdty:id>  <cmdty:name>DIA</cmdty:name>  <cmdty:fraction>1000</cmdty:fraction>  <cmdty:get_quotes/>  <cmdty:quote_source>alphavantage</cmdty:quote_source>  <cmdty:quote_tz/>  <cmdty:slots>    <slot>      <slot:key>user_symbol</slot:key>      <slot:value type="string">DIA</slot:value>    </slot>  </cmdty:slots></gnc:commodity>
 . . .
<gnc:transaction version="2.0.0">  <trn:id type="guid">20d545fb18b34e7ca920c11335705ac4</trn:id>  <trn:currency>    <cmdty:space>CURRENCY</cmdty:space>    <cmdty:id>USD</cmdty:id>  </trn:currency>  <trn:date-posted>    <ts:date>2023-05-22 10:59:00 +0000</ts:date>  </trn:date-posted>  <trn:date-entered>    <ts:date>2023-05-26 14:36:25 +0000</ts:date>  </trn:date-entered>  <trn:description>IRC</trn:description>