Bash – How to use 7z to archive all the files and directories (including hidden ones) in a directory

7zbashwildcards

Because of specifics of my archiving needs I am not comfortable with solid tar.gz archives and use 7z instead.

I use the following command to do this:

7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/*

To create an archive of everything inside ~/my/folder/ as the ~/my/folder.7z file.

But ~/my/folder/.hiddenFolder doesm't get into the archive then. How to fix this? Isn't * supposed to return all the files and folders?

Best Answer

If you want the contents of a single directory, an easy method is to change to it first:

cd ~/my/folder
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z .

What you saw is that * expands to the list of names of files that don't begin with a .. That's the documented behavior, and it's the main reason why files whose name begins with a . are said to be hidden (the other is that ls doesn't show them by default).

There's no really convenient portable way to list all files in a directory. You can use

~/my/folder/..?* ~/my/folder/.[!.]* ~/my/folder/*

but if there is no file matching one of the patterns then the pattern will remain unexpanded. In bash, you can set the dotglob option to avoid treating a leading . specially (. and .. are still excluded from the matches):

shopt -s dotglob
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/*

In ksh, or in bash if you set the extglob option (or in zsh if you set the ksh_glob option), you can write a pattern that matches all files except . and ..:

7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/@(..?*|.[!.]*|*)

In zsh, there's a simpler way of saying that . must not be treated specially in a pattern:

7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/*(D)
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