BASH Unzip (and Search) Many Files in Directories

dougp23 · 03-09-2011, 12:34 PM

Our email system does a backup each day of all email sent and received, and stores it in a directory with the date stamp, so:

mail/2010-10-10/2010-10-10.zip
mail/2010-10-11/2010-10-11.zip
mail/2010-10-12/2010-10-12.zip

etc

I now have to provide all emails from jsmith@whatver.com from 2010-10-01 to 2010-12-31. Of course, this is impossible to do until I unzip everything!

There has got to be a way to automate this! I am thinking some sort of bash script would walk through all the directories unzipping as it went, then I could use egrep or something for what i am looking for.

Appreciate any help!

szboardstretcher · 03-09-2011, 12:36 PM

Do you have to keep the unzipped files in the dated directories? Or can the unzipped files be lumped into one directory together?

dougp23 · 03-09-2011, 12:41 PM

Nope, it could all be unzipped into one big directory! I'm not fussy, lol!

szboardstretcher · 03-09-2011, 01:20 PM

Code:

cd /mail/directory/; find . -name \*.zip -exec unzip {} -d /some/directory/to/unzip/to/ \;

colucix · 03-09-2011, 01:45 PM

What about zipgrep? It is a shell script usually provided by the unzip package that does exactly what you're looking for, using unzip and egrep.