tar -zcvf compressFileName.tar.gz folderToCompress

everything in folderToCompress will go to compressFileName

Edit: After review and comments I realized that people may get confused with compressFileName without an extension. If you want you can use .tar.gz extension(as suggested) with the compressFileName

gzip will always compress each file into a single .gz file when given a list of files on its command line.

For example

$ gzip -r log.2011

to recursively walk the log.2011 directory and compress all files it finds, or

$ gzip log.2011/*

to compress only the files in the log.2011 directory without descending into subdirectories.

No.

Unlike zip, gzip functions as a compression algorithm only.

Because of various reasons some of which hearken back to the era of tape drives, Unix uses a program named tar to archive data, which can then be compressed with a compression program like gzip, bzip2, 7zip, etc.

In order to "zip" a directory, the correct command would be

tar -zcvf archive.tar.gz directory/ 

This will tell tar to

• compress it using the z (gzip) algorithm

• c (create) an archive from the files in directory (tar is recursive by default)

• v (verbosely) list (on /dev/stderr so it doesn't affect piped commands) all the files it adds to the archive.

• and store the output as a f (file) named archive.tar.gz

The tar command offers gzip support (via the -z flag) purely for your convenience. The gzip command/lib is completely separate. The command above is effectively the same as

tar -cv directory | gzip > archive.tar.gz

To decompress and unpack the archive into the current directory you would use

tar -zxvf archive.tar.gz

That command is effectively the same as

gunzip < archive.tar.gz | tar -xv

tar has many, many, MANY other options and uses as well; I heartily recommend reading through its manpage sometime.

You can use gzip *

Note:

• This will zip each file individually and DELETE the original.
• Use -k (--keep) option to keep the original files.
• This may not work if you have a huge number of files due to limits of the shell
• To run gzip in parallel see @MarkSetchell's answer below.

I'd prefer gzip -r ./ which does the same thing but is shorter.

I would use

find /path/to/dir \( -name '*.css' -o -name '*.html' \) -exec gzip --verbose --keep {} \;

Change name to iname if you want to match the extensions case-insensitively (i.e. include .CSS and/or .HTML extensions). You can omit the /path/to/dir if you want to start the recursive search from the current directory.

Putting every file into a separate tar file doesn't make any sense in this scenario. You can use gzip to compress them directly:

gzip *

will result in file1.out.gz, file2.out.gz etc.

You would use tar only if you would need a compressed archive as a single file.

If you ineed need a tar archive for every file, you can create it like so:

for i in *; do tar -czf $i.tar.gz $i; done

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.

The simplest option might be to use the split command in combination with find and tar's -T/--files-from option:

find ... -type f -print0 | 
  split -t '\0' -l 100 -d --filter 'tar czf archive-$FILE.tar.gz --files-from=- --null'

split will also take care of setting filenames with sequential numbering (the -d option sets numbered filenames instead of the usual alphabetic ones).

With a combination of find and xargs, I couldn't find a way to get reliable sequential numbering of the archives, so I used uuidgen:

find <directory> -type f -print0 | xargs -n 100 -0 sh -c 'tar -czf archive-$(uuidgen).tar.gz "$@"' _

Or you could use bash loops:

count=1
N=100
find <directory> -type f -print0  | 
{
while true
do
    files=()
    for ((i=0;i<N;i++))   # Add N filenames to the `files` array
    do
        IFS= read -d '' -r file
        files+=("$file")
    done
    ((count++))
    tar -czf archive-$count.tar.gz "${files[@]}"
done
}

An assumption in all these commands is that find is not being run in the current directory. Otherwise, you might end up tarring a tar file. If you have to run it in the current directory, then I suggest saving the filenames to a file and then reading the filenames from that file for split/xargs/the loop.