r3dux.org

Lets say you’ve got a bunch of folders taking up a large swathe of space which you never really use but want to keep, just not taking up stacks of your NAS… How can you easily compress them all up to individual archives of each folder? Dead easy:

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#!/bin/bash
for folder in */
do
  7z a -mx9 -mmt "${folder%/}.7z" "$folder"
done

Save that to a file, chmod +x it and run in the location you want to compress the folders. Every folder (and all contents within) will be compressed to its own foldername.7z archive.

With 7z, -mx9 is the flag for maximum compression, and -mmt says to use multiple CPUs to speed up compression, so omit that part if you’re on a single core machine.