Compress multiple files individually with Gzip

Question

I have several directories that look like this:

dir1/
  |_foo.txt
  |_bar.txt
dir2/
  |_qux.txt
  |_bar.txt

For each of this directory I want to compress the files inside it into *.gz format then delete the uncompressed ones. So finally we hope to get something like this:

 dir1/
   |_foo.gz
   |_bar.gz
 dir2/
   |_qux.gz
   |_bar.gz

Is there a simple Unix way to do it?

score 50 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 25 '09 at 13:34

50

gzip */*.txt

But the extension for each file will be .txt.gz, as gzip uses it to know the original filename.

answered Apr 25 '09 at 13:34

Juliano

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Just for clarification as it is not obvious: gzip will delete the uncompressed files itself. – ypnos Apr 26 '09 at 07:56
is there a way to not delete the originals? I currently am using the -c flag (gzip -9 -c style.css > style.css.gz) – ansiart Oct 28 '10 at 22:36
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6258972/gzip-multiple-files-individually-and-keep-the-original-files – Charles L. Jun 06 '11 at 23:35
-k to --keep :) – J.J Mar 07 '17 at 03:30

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 25 '09 at 13:38

13

gzip -r dir1 dir2

answered Apr 25 '09 at 13:38

vovick

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dogbane · Answer 3 · 2012-12-17T16:08:50.227

10

The following will work even if you have sub-directories. E.g. dir1/dir2/.../foo.txt

find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec gzip {} \;

edited Dec 17 '12 at 16:08

answered Apr 27 '09 at 07:29

dogbane

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You could also do `gzip ./**/*.txt`, which recurses into all directories within the current one, gzipping all text files, and deleting the originals. – thekingoftruth Oct 13 '16 at 05:32

Compress multiple files individually with Gzip

3 Answers3