Ubuntu – How to zip specific files that are located in subdirectories

command linesshzip

I have a directory that consists of many subdirectories, and each subdirectory contains different files such as:

Directory All contains subdirectories A, B, C, and D. Each subdirectory contains files such as:

A (Run1.csv, Run4.csv)
B (Run2.csv, Run3.csv)
C (Run1.csv, Run3.csv)
D (Run2.csv, Run4.csv)

As you can see, each file has different duplicates in different subdirectories. For example, Run1.csv in folder A has different data from Run1.csv in folder C.

What I want to do is that I want to zip a specific run file, for example, I want to zip all the files of run2. I used the following commands:

zip run2.zip All Run2.csv 

zip run2.zip Run2.csv

But none of them works.

How can I fix that?

Best Answer

You can use bash Pathname Expansion as follows:

zip run2.zip */Run2.csv

*/Run2.csv matches every file called Run2.csv in any subdirectory. If you have very many files that match the glob, this fails because of the shell’s ARG_MAX limit. To work around that, use:

printf '%s\0' */Run2.csv | xargs -0 zip run2.zip

This uses the builtin printf to build up a zero-delimited list of the matching files and pipes it to xargs, which calls zip as often as necessary. As add is zip’s default mode, it updates the archive adding the files to it.

If you need to dig further into an unknown or changing number of subdirectories, set bash’s globstar option with

shopt -s globstar

and use:

zip run2.zip **/Run2.csv  # or respectively
printf '%s\0' **/Run2.csv | xargs -0 zip run2.zip

**/Run2.csv matches every file called Run2.csv in any subdirectory recursively.

Further reading

Related Question