The size definitely gets bigger with each iteration:
$ echo text >0.txt $ for i in {0..9}; do gzip <$i.txt >$((i + 1)).txt done $ ls | sort -n | xargs -n1 wc -c 5 0.txt 25 1.txt 46 2.txt 69 3.txt 82 4.txt 105 5.txt 120 6.txt 143 7.txt 161 8.txt 184 9.txt 207 10.txt
The size definitely gets bigger with each iteration: