using 10.0.0 Darwin Unix version
How would i go about writing a command line to take all my files in a certain directory, gzip them, and then save in another directory

Doing a python tutorial and this is one of the problems it poses..
any help would greatly be appreciated!

If you want to create a tarball to backup all of your files to another directory, try this:

tar -cvzpf /newdirectory/newfile.tgz /olddirectory

Then you would expand/restore it like this: tar -C /restoredirectory -xvzpf /newdirectory/newfile.tgz
Or simply tar -xvzpf newfile.tgz to just expand it in place.

The c switch is "create"
The x is "extract"
The z is "gzip" (if supported - depends on distro)
The p is "permissions" (it keeps all your permissions the intact, rather than using umask)
The f is "file"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_%28file_format%29


This won't help you with the python aspect necessarily

If you want to do it just with gzip you can; see the examples here http://linux.die.net/man/1/gzip