Can anyone show me a simpler way:

[Guy Harris]

 >How about this using SysV's /bin/find
 >
 >  find . -name \*.Z -print -exec uncompress {} \;
 >
 >or this using either GNU's or BSD's find
 >
 >  find . -name \*.Z -exec uncompress {} \;
 >

The only difference between the two examples is the presence of the
"-print" option.  The S5 "find" version should work without the
"-print", and the BSD (and presumably GNU) version should work with it. 
(The BSD and S5 "find" are both recognizably descendants of the same
older "find".)  Put it in iff you want "find" to announce the names of
all the files that it's feeding to "uncompress"....