bzip subdirectories

[hhh3h]

Hi, can bzip compress files in subdirectories of the directory you tell it to? if so can you please give me the command switches or something like that? thanks

[hazel]

I don't think you can do this using bzip2 alone (though gzip has a recursion option). You can certainly do it with tar, using the -j option to invoke bzip2 as the compressor.

tar -jf zipped_output.tbz directory

[hhh3h]

ok thank you. i'll just write a program to cycle through each subdirectory and call bzip on all the files in each

[Cabhan]

Now hold on a sec. I think the solution to this depends on understanding what bzip does, and what you want.

bzip is a utility that takes a single file and compresses it. I think you can do some weird things that allow it to handle multiple files, but this is not intelligent.

Instead, if you want a single bzip archive to contain multiple files (or, say, a directory), you first create a tarball of the relevant files. A tarball is basically a box containing a bunch of different files. This is why you rarely see a straight .bz file: instead, you tend to see .tar.bz.

If you are wanting individual bzip archives of every file under a subtree, then iterating through each one is what you want (though I don't see why you would do this). If you want to compress an entire directory (including subdirectories), then make a tarball of the directory and then bzip that.

Make sense?

[hhh3h]

thanks, i know all about tarballs though. i use them all the time, although I prefer to gzip a tarball with ultra compression rather than bzip.

I need to use bzip and compress each file individually for Counter-Strike Source fastdownload. that's just how it works.