Centos – Attempted gzip of directory applied gzip to each file individually

centosgzip

I tried to gzip a directory with the following command:

gzip -r /home/path/to/backups/mydirectory.gz /home/site/public_html/

I was expecting to see a .gz file show up inside …backups containing all the files found in …public_html. This isn't what happened. Instead, every file was (recursively) renamed to [filename].gz within public_html. This, obviously, brought an entire site down.

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Two questions: 1) What did I do wrong with the syntax? and 2) How can I revert all of the filenames back to what they were before (exactly what they are now, minus the .gz extension).

Best Answer

Two questions: 1) What did I do wrong with the syntax?

Gzip only compresses individual files; it's not an archiving tool. It's usually used in combination with something like tar. In fact, some versions of tar will use gzip to automatically create a compressed archive if given appropriate flags. For example:

tar -cvz -f public_html.tar.gz /home/site/public_html/

This creates (-c) a gzip-compressed (-z) archive called public_html.tar.gz containing the contents of the specified public_html directory.

2) How can I revert all of the filenames back to what they were before (exactly what they are now, minus the .gz extension).

Just run gunzip on all the files. E.g:

gunzip -r /home/site/public_html/

Note that you can also simply use the zip command, which will create a single compressed archive.

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Linux – `outputscript | gzip > $file` not overwriting $file

Most likely, your script is written to use Bash features, but it's being run by the Bourne shell. Do you have #!/bin/bash as the first line of your script? Please post it so we can better help you.

Edit:

In scripts that are meant to run as cron jobs, I always specify the full path to programs (such as mysqldump and gzip) since the $PATH variable and things like aliases are going to be different from those in your interactive shell. That way, the results are predictable.

Linux – how to copy & gzip files individually over ssh

I suppose you rather want to gzip them first, then send them across.

cat dafile | gzip -c | ssh remote "cat > dafile"

Repeat with relevant loop construct. E.g.

find -type f | while read fname ; do cat $fname | gzip -c | ssh remote "cat > $fname" ; done

... or something to that effect. Need to set up pkey access, or this will be one massive password-speedtyping excercise.

EDIT:

On the subject of a single connection, see man ssh_config ControlMaster. This will mean you save the overhead of negotiating 5999 of those 6000 SSH sessions.

EDIT2:

Haha! I win!

tar zcf - /dir/of/files | ssh remote "tar zxf - --to-command=mygzip.sh"

mygzip.sh, present on the remote machine, looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
mkdir -p "$(dirname $TAR_FILENAME)"
gzip -c > "${TAR_FILENAME}.gz"

Best Answer

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