In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to recursively archive (tar.bz2) folders into archives file with same folder names. I’ll use find to list all directories; then archive each folder using tar and parallel.

Scenario

Let’s assume that we have following directories:

drwxr-xr-x 37 macbookair staff 1258 Nov 22 18:16 folder_number_one
-rw-r--r-- 1 macbookair staff 35342662 Nov 22 18:16 foo_file.txt
drwxr-xr-x 9 macbookair staff 306 Nov 22 18:16 folder_number_two
-rw-r--r-- 1 macbookair staff 16505 Nov 22 18:16 foo_bar.txt
drwxr-xr-x 7 macbookair staff 238 Nov 22 18:16 folder_number_three
drwxr-xr-x 7 macbookair staff 238 Nov 22 18:17 folder with space

Objective

The objective is to recursively archive folder_number_one, folder_number_two, folder_number_three into folder_number_one.tar.bz2, folder_number_two.tar.bz2, folder_number_three.tar.bz2 respectively.

Solution

One magic command does ALL:

$ find ./* -type d -print | parallel tar cjvf {}.tar.bz2 {}

How it works?

$ find ./* -type d -print
./folder with space
./folder_number_one
./folder_number_three
./folder_number_two

Next, I used parallel to parse in the list to tar:

find ./* -type d -print | parallel tar cjvf {}.tar.bz2 {}

{} represents every single folder name in the list. You could customize the archive name easily by amending to this {} symbol. For example:

find ./* -type d -print | parallel tar cjvf {}-archived.tar.bz2 {}

which append -achived into the filename to give you:

folder_number_one-archived.tar.bz2
...

Why this solution is better than using ls and awk?

There are many solutions, one is to use ls -l to list all directories then pipe the output to awk to grep the last field start with d (that is directory type). Yet that solution suffers one flaw: directory names’spaces will be omitted in the output.