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

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

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.

No, gzip can't do this, -r just means "descend into subdirectories" but there is no option for "descend into subdirectories and then look for files matching this glob". The expansion of the *.vtu glob happens before grep is launched, and it is handled by the shell not grep, so grep is given a specific list of files: those files matching *.vtu in the current directory.

So yes, globstar is your best bet. As for the use of -r, that is explained in man gzip:

-r --recursive
       Travel the directory structure recursively.  If any of the file
       names  specified on the command line are directories, gzip will
       descend into the directory and compress all the files it  finds
       there (or decompress them in the case of gunzip ).

So gzip -r foo means "descend into foo if foo is a directory and gzip any files in it". If foo matches both files and directories, if for example you had both file.vtu and my.vtu/ in the directory you ran gzip in, then the contents of my.vtu would also be compressed. Without it, you would get my.vtu is a directory -- ignored.

Other options include:

• find . -name "*.vtu" -exec gzip {} + to compress all matching files.
• gzip **/*.vtu with globstar set.
• find . -name "*.vtu" | xargs gzip (as long as your names are sane and don't contain newlines)
• find . -name "*.vtu" -print0 | xargs -0 gzip (if your file names can contain newlines)

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.

gunzip has -r option. From man gunzip :

   -r --recursive
          Travel  the directory structure recursively. If any of the 
file names specified on the command line are directories, gzip 
will descend into the directory and compress all the files it finds
there (or decompress them in  the  case  of gunzip ).

So, if you want to gunzip all compressed files (gunzip can currently decompress files created by gzip, zip, compress, compress -H or pack) inside the directory /foo/bar and all its subdirectories :

gunzip -r /foo/bar

This will handle file names with spaces too.

If you want, for each of those, to launch "gzip -d" on them:

cd theparentdir && gzip -d $(find ./ -type f -name '*.gz')

and then, to gzip them back:

cd theparentdir && gzip $(find ./ -type f -name '*.csv')

This will however choke in many cases

• if filenames have some special characters (spaces, tabs, newline, etc) in them
• other similar cases
• or if there are TOO MANY files to be put after the gzip command!

A solution would be instead, if you have GNU find, to do :

find ... -print0 | xarsg -0 gzip -d # for the gunzip one, but still choke on files with "newline" in them

Another (arguably better?) solution, if you have GNU find at your disposal:

cd theparentdir && find ./ -type f -name '*.gz' -exec gzip -d '{}' '+'

and to re-zip all csv in that parentdir & all subdirs:

cd theparentdir && find ./ -type f -name '*.csv' -exec gzip '{}' '+'

"+" tells GNU find to try to put as many found files as it can on each gzip invocation (instead of doing 1 gzip incocation per file, very very ressource intensive and very innefficient and slow), similar to xargs, but with some benefits (1 command only, no pipe needed)

find . -name '*.BRIK' -type f -exec gzip --best -v {} +

This would find all regular files that have the filename suffix .BRIK in or under the current directory. For batches of these files, the gzip command would be called with the options --best and -v to compress the files.

find . -type f | \
while read -r x
do
  gzip -c "$x" > "$x.gz"
done

The -c pushes the result to stdout and keeps the original alone. The disadvantage is, that you need to find the files yourself. For more sophisticated traversing, you can use find(1), however, like above: . searches starting from the current directory, and -type f returns the name of every regular file.

This small script seems to be your best option, given your requirements:

cd directory
for dir in */
do
  base=$(basename "$dir")
  tar -czf "${base}.tar.gz" "$dir"
done

It properly handles directories with spaces in their names.