How to zip only files under multiple subdirectories?

Question

I have a folder working and its structure is something like this -

working/
  100/
      1/
      2/
      3/
  200/
      1/
      2/
      3/
  300/
      1/
      2/
      3/

And each of these 1 2 3 folders have around 1000 files.

I want to zip the files under the 1 2 3 folders separately. The zip should not contain their top directories. Put the zips wherever they are. Such as, if there are files foo1, foo2 and foo3 under folder 1 then it should form a zip under 1 which should just have the foo files.

Answer 1

A simple loop will do the trick.

cd working
for dir in */*/; do
  [ -e "$dir/files.zip" ] ||   # skip directories where the zip already exists
  ( cd -- "$dir" && zip -r files.zip .)
done

Note that zip is smart enough to skip the zip file that is being built when recursing in that directory. Some other archiving programs would attempt to stuff the archive being built into the archive that's being built.