Compressing Directory

Question

I want to compress (tar or gzip or zip) directories older than two days. I have the files below. Each directory will have multiple subdirectories and files.

Oct 21 13:01 test1
Oct 22 13:01 test2 

Desired output:

   test1.tar
   test2.tar

I tried writing the command, below; but, it is not working.

   find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime +2 \! -name '*.gz' -exec gzip {} \;

I am getting the below error.

   gzip:test1.tar is a directory -- ignored
   gzip:test2.tar is a directory -- ignored

Answer 1

Because gzip can ONLY compress files, you first must tar the directories prior to gzipping them.

What you want to do is use GNU tar with "z", "z" compresses:

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime +2 \! -name '*.gz' -exec tar cfz {}.tgz {} \;

EDIT After Comment:

I had not paid attention to \! -name '*.gz', which under normal circumstances is superfluous ... provided you have no directory names ending in .gz.

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime +2 -exec tar cfz {}.tgz {} \;

Answer 2

Use tar archiving utility:

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime +2 ! -name '*.gz' -exec tar -czvf old_dirs.gz '{}' +;

---

-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files.