BASH/Linux - Need a command to recursively compress a specific file type within a multiple level directory

Question

I need to compress a considerable number of pdf and txt files but I want to leave the file structure untouched. The directories have many, many subdirectories.

When I want to compress files of a specific type in a single directory I run:

for i in `find | grep -E "\.pdf$|\.txt$"`; do gzip "$i" ; done

but this would take me years to do by hand.

It looks like you already have a command to do that. What exactly do you want to know? — Michael Hampton, May 08 '18 at 16:15

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 08 '18 at 16:29

Try this in top-level directory.

find . -type f -mmin +1 '(' -iname '*.txt' -o -iname '*.pdf' ')' -exec gzip {} ';'

I took the liberty to only gzip files older than 2 minutes, so that it doesn't touch files that are likely to be presently being written to (mmin +1 does that).

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 08 '18 at 16:15

1

Im not certain why your existing 'command' isnt working. This script should though. Run in a parent directory.

#!/bin/bash

find . -type f| while read FILE
do
  if grep -E "\.pdf$|\.txt$"; then
    gzip ${FILE}
  fi
done

answered May 08 '18 at 16:15

Sirch

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You are right, my original command did work, I just assumed (yes, I know) that it wouldn't as I only tested it in a single directory with no sub directories. Thank you for your reply :) – Patrick Morton May 08 '18 at 17:26

BASH/Linux - Need a command to recursively compress a specific file type within a multiple level directory

2 Answers2