How to create separate zip files for each selected file/directory in 7zip

7-ziparchivingpackertotal-commanderzip

This is the internal zip packer from Total Commander:

A picture of the Total Commander zip packer dialogue box.

However I want to use my 7zip packer. When I select 5 files, I get 5 separate .zip archives for each selected file. How do I do that in 7zip?

Best Answer

I am not sure you can do what you are suggesting using the graphical user interface, but you can certainly from the command line:

FOR %i IN (*.*) DO 7z.exe a "%~ni.7z" "%i"

You would need to change directory (the cd command) to the F:\Downloads directory first, or whatever directory you would want to perform the mass compression. Also, it is easy enough to substitute in *.exe or whatever extension you want to filter for to just compress those documents.

And the secret decoder ring:

  • %i is a variable that holds the file name for each step in the loop
  • (*.*) is the selection criteria, it could easily be *.exe or similar
  • 7z.exe is the command line version of 7-Zip
  • %~ni - this expands the %i variable to just the file name - no extension

If you wanted to just add the folders for a given directory, the command is a bit more complex as by default FOR just works with files. We need to feed it some additional information:

FOR /F "usebackq delims=?" %i IN (`DIR /B /A:D`) DO 7z.exe a "%i.7z" "%i"

This works because of a few pieces of what seems like magic:

  • /F tells FOR to iterate over the expanded value in ()
  • usebackq tells FOR that I am going to pass a command and use the output to iterate
  • delims=? tells FOR that I want to break tokens apart on the ? - an illegal character in file names and directories. I only want one token.
  • The /B in DIR is for bare format - just the name
  • The /A:D in DIR is for restricting the results by attribute, the D is for directories

If you want to encapsulate this inside of a batch file, the only change you will need to make is to double escape the %i variable:

FOR %%i IN (*.*) DO 7z.exe a "%%~ni.7z" "%%i"
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