Don Russell wrote:
Not FC5 specific...
I am trying to use a (simple) command to gzip a bunch of files in a
given directory... BUT I want to keep the original files too. gzip
does not seem to have an option to keep the original file. In some
cases, the file names contain blanks and or $ characters...
I want to gzip each file individually, not combine several files into
one .gz file.
So, I thought some form of ls and xargs would do the trick and I would
be done in 5 minutes. :-)
ls -1 *[^.gz] | xargs -r -I {fn} gzip -c {fn} > {fn}.gz
(hours pass, reams of reading later...)
I added the -p option to xargs so I could see what it is actually
doing (vs what I think it should do) and see the command actually
stops at the >. The > {fn}.gz isn't part of the command created by
xargs...
Try again, escaping the > ...
ls -1 *[^.gz] | xargs -rp -I {fn} gzip -c {fn} \> {fn}.gz
Thanks to all who replied..... I learned a very important thing about
xargs.... xargs does not use a shell to run the command, so the command
build by xargs cannot use redirection.
This is what I did in it's place and it works well, including handling
file with blanks etc...
find *[^.gz] -print0 | while read -d $'\0' fn;
do
gzip -c --best "$fn" > "$fn.gz";
touch -r "$fn" "$fn.gz";
done;
Works great.... not as easy as, say...
ls -1Q *[^.gz] | xargs -rI {fn} gzip -k --best {fn}
Where a -k option means "and keep the original file where you are done"
But, there it is... and it works fne. :-)
