gzip help
 

Hi
i have used this command before but i cant remember the syntax quite well
its
ls -l Apr-[0-3][0-9]-2008-*.log | xargs -i@ gzip@
but it is not working
error : xargs: gzip@: No such file or directory

Quite right you can't remember the syntax. What are you trying to do?

If you want to collect some log files into an archive, you don't want the -l on the ls command. You don't even want to be using the ls command. And you don't want gzip, you want tar.

tar cfz sometarfile.tgz Apr-[0-3][0-9]-2008-*.log

cfz: c = create, f = filename will be given, z = compressed

I can only guess that you may be after something like this:

the dash one to ls prints one filename per line and then xargs passes that to gzip so that each *.log is compressed to a file of the corresponding filename plus a .gz extension.

Hope this helps.

Or if you're trying to zip up everything separately, use something like:
edit: Beaten to it. lol

This was what i was looking for cheers
thanks alot that helped everyone

Why not simply...?

My guess is it is desired to have each log compressed individually for easy "lookup" to review a single instance (?day?) should it be needed. ;)

You are right. Indeed, the gzip command compresses files individually (unlike the zip command)! ;)