Bz2 every file in a dir

Question

I am running centos and I have around 1,300 files in a folder that each need to be bzipped individually. What would be the easiest way of handing this?

Answer 1

If all the files are in a single directory then:

bzip2 *

Is enough. A more robust approach is:

find . -type f -exec bzip2 {} +

Which will compress every file in the current directory and its sub-directories, and will work even if you have tens of thousands of files (using * will break if there are too many files in the directory).

If your computer has multiple cores, then you can improve this further by compressing multiple files at once. For example, if you would like to compress 4 files concurrently, use:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 -P4 bzip2

Answer 2

To bzip2 on a multi-core Mac, you can issue the following command (when you're inside the folder you want to bzip)

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 -P14 /opt/local/bin/bzip2

This will bzip every file recursively inside the folder your terminal is in using 14 CPU cores simultaneously.

You can adjust how many cores to use by editing

 -P14

If you don't know where the bzip2 binary is, you can issue the following command to figure it out

which bzip2

The output of that command is what you can replace

/opt/local/bin/bzip2

with