Re: How to recursively zip all files insied a directory

I will assume that you are working on a Linux/Unix system.

The short answer, which is my preferred method:

tar -zcvf packagename.tar.gz path_to_directory
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This will 'zip' up everything under directory_name into a single archive packagename.tar.gz, while preserving directory structure (assuming you have the GNU version of tar).

Slightly longer answer:

find path1/* path2/* -exec gzip {} \;
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This will find all files under path1 and path2 (recursively), gzip the files found (and implicitly removing the original files).

Now if you want to do that in a perl script -

...
my @paths = qw! /usr/home/blah  /usr/home/foo !;
system("/usr/bin/find $_/* -exec gzip {} \\;") for @paths;
...
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Or you could use the File::Find module and then invoke 'gzip' for each of the files found.

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Re: How to recursively zip all files insied a directory by b10m (Vicar) on Jan 15, 2004 at 11:54 UTC
I agree that the gnu tools are probably more of a help here than Perl, but I do have some comments on your examples, for the don't really seem to do what the OP asked for (if I understand the post right). tar -zcvf packagename.tar.gz path_to_directory This creates a single file, as you state, but the OP is looking for multiple gzip files. find path1/* path2/* -exec gzip {} \; This will fail too, for the OP states that there are sub directories ;) This will probably work better: `find path/ -type f -exec gzip {} \;` [download] The problem with this is that a new process will be started for each file (IIRC). Not very efficient if there are a lot of files. So, to change it a little bit more, I would go for the following approach: `find path/ -type f -print0 \| xargs -0 gzip` [download] Do note the `-print0` and `-0`. If the files contain spaces, and you leave this out, weird things may happen ;) HTH -- b10m	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: How to recursively zip all files insied a directory by Roger (Parson) on Jan 15, 2004 at 12:30 UTC
`tar -zcvf packagename.tar.gz path_to_directory` I thought that was a good way to zip up directories and files recursively. Just to offer an alternative on the off chance that OP is looking for a way to save some space. Zipping everything into a single tar file will certainly save a lot more disk space than zipping them individually. `find path/ -type f -exec gzip {} \;` That's a good catch. I forgot about find will return directory names too.	[reply] [d/l] [select]