How to create tar.gz of each file of a particular type in single command?

Question

I need to compress and decompress each of the files of a particular type say *.html in their respective location. For decompression, I used following command, it seemed to work for me:

find dir -name "*.html.tar.gz" -exec tar -xvzf {} \;

I'm able to see *.htmp.tar.gz in their respective directories.

For compression, I'm trying following command but it is not working as concatenation is not happening to the argument from find:

find dir -name "*.html" -exec tar -cvzf {}.tar.gz {} \;

Please suggest solution to this and let me know if solution to the decompression is not foolproof.

EDIT: Although I've right now used gunzip which do not require target name, but I'm wondering if tar is not possible at all. So, waiting for answer which solves the original problem.

EDIT: the requirement is to have a single command because I need to run it through fork() and exec() command from C function. So, I think piping is not possible.

EDIT: Also I'm looking for efficient way, because I want as little overhead as possible to the time taken for compression.

Answer 1

find . -name '*.html' -type f -exec sh -c '
   for file do tar czf "$file.tar.gz" "$file"; done' sh {} +

In C:

execlp("find", "find", ".", "-name", "*.html", "-type", "f", "-exec",
       "sh", "-c", "for file do tar czf \"$file.tar.gz\" \"$file\"; done",
       "sh", "{}", "+", 0);

To report failure or any archiving process to the caller, you could improve it to:

find . -name '*.html' -type f -exec sh -c '
  ok=true
  for file do
    tar czf "$file.tar.gz" "$file" || ok=false
  done
  "$ok"' sh {} +

With -exec cmd {} +, find exits with a non-zero exit status if any of the processes it spawns to execute the commands return with a non-zero exit status.

Answer 2

You have to use xargs to achieve this:

find "dir" -name "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 -I % tar zcpf %.tar.gz %

It handles almost all special characters in filenames.