hi,

there are alot of log file in the directory:

20040421.txt
20040422.txt
..
..
20040707.txt
20040708.txt


I wanna to gzip:
20040421.txt -> 20040421.txt.gz
20040422.txt -> 20040422.txt.gz
...
...
...
until
20040708.txt - > 20040708.txt.gz

Exclude the latest log, which is today's log.txt

Something like

should do the trick ...


Cheers,
Tink

I'm more of a newbie than the last guy, so I can make it simpler. I'm sure he's right, but it's too
much of a scripting tour de force to read it!

I'm not sure you really want gzip, because it seems to individually compress the files without
putting them all together into a single file (unlike Windows zip or PKZIP which you are probably
used to already).

So gzip * compresses everything, but as separate files. (Well I guess you asked that).
In Linux, the packaging is more typically
done with "tar". "Tar" like everything Linux tends to like to output to stdio if you don't give it
a -f option. So what you want is:

tar -cf yourarchive *
After you have this, you can gzip youracrchive to also compress it.

You wanted not to include one file. You can tar as above, then use
tar --delete 20040708.txt to remove that one file before gzipping.

Heh - it's not that hard ... the only half-way
complex thing is this bit:

determine the number of files, and subtract one,
which I do to only get the "oldest" entries in tail...
the
gives you all entries sorted by date, newest first
(thus in the first line). With the tail-bit I cut-off the
newest one. And with the xargs gzip the older
ones get zipped individually, which is exactly what
the fellow had asked for.


Cheers,
Tink

Tink - Thanks for the lesson!