Linux – Zip many files into several archives

1. Pass -s to zip.
2. zipsplit

The solution is pretty easy. If you want to do this for every file, recursively, use find. It will list all files and directories, descending into subdirectories too.

find . -type f -execdir zip '{}.zip' '{}' \;

Explanation:

• The first argument is the directory you want to begin in, .
• Then we will restrict it to find files only (-type f)
• The -execdir option allows us to run a command on each file found, executing it from the file's directory
• This command is evaluated as zip file.txt.zip file.txt, for example, since all occurrences of {} are replaced with the actual file name. This command needs to be ended with \;

Of course, find has more options. If instead you just want to stay in your current directory, not descending into subdirectories:

find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -execdir zip '{}.zip' '{}' \;

If you want to restrict it to certain file types, use the -name option (or -iname for case-insensitive matching):

find . -type f -name "*.txt" …

Anything else (including looping with for over the output of ls *) is pretty ugly syntax in my opinion and likely to break, e.g. on files with spaces in their name or due to too many arguments.