Find and zip the individual files and remove the original

Question

Let have a directory with lots of individual .txt files. My purpose is to find the individual files in the directory, zip them with the same name (excluding .txt) individually and remove the original file.

It is very easy to use gzip like below:

find .* -type f | xargs gzip 

but I need to zip the files instead.

NOTE: I do not have sudo privilege

Answer 1

From man:

  -m
   --move
          Move  the  specified  files  into the zip archive; actually, this deletes the target directories/files after making the specified zip archive. If a directory
          becomes empty after removal of the files, the directory is also removed. No deletions are done until zip has created the archive without error.  This is use-
          ful  for  conserving  disk  space, but is potentially dangerous so it is recommended to use it in combination with -T to test the archive before removing all
          input files.

To compress ann files in current direstory

zip -m test.zip *.txt

Try this,

for i in *.txt; 
do
  zip -m "${i%.*}.zip" "${i%.*}".*; 
done

The above code will take all file with .txt as extension in a for loop and zip each file with their prefix name...

Answer 2

Consider:

$ ls -1
a.txt
b.txt
c.txt
d.jpg

The following command will zip each .txt file in the current directory and remove the original file:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -exec zip -Tm {}.zip {} \;
 

Result:

$ ls -1
a.txt.zip
b.txt.zip
c.txt.zip
d.jpg

Note: we used the -T option to test the integrity of the archive before removing the input file. This is recommended in the zip man page for the -m option.

Note that the .txt part is still present in the filename. This is how gzip behaves as well.

To remove the .txt part:

If you don't want the .txt part to remain in the filename, the following command will achieve this:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -exec bash -c \
  'zip -Tm "${1%.txt}".zip "$1"' _ {} \;

Result:

$ ls -1
a.zip
b.zip
c.zip
d.jpg

Note: we provided _ as the 0th argument to the shell script so that the positional arguments to our script start at 1 as usual. Any value could have been used. This is discussed in the BashFAQ.