fighting with xargs :-(

[Don Russell]

Not FC5 specific...

I am trying to use a (simple) command to gzip a bunch of files in a 
given directory... BUT I want to keep the original files too. gzip does 
not seem to have an option to keep the original file. In some cases, the 
file names contain blanks and or $ characters...

I want to gzip each file individually, not combine several files into 
one .gz file.

So, I thought some form of ls and xargs would do the trick and I would 
be done in 5 minutes. :-)

ls -1 *[^.gz] | xargs -r -I {fn} gzip -c {fn} > {fn}.gz

(hours pass, reams of reading later...)

I added the -p option to xargs so I could see what it is actually doing 
(vs what I think it should do) and see the command actually stops at the 
 >. The > {fn}.gz isn't part of the command created by xargs...

Try again, escaping the > ...
ls -1 *[^.gz] | xargs -rp -I {fn} gzip -c {fn} \> {fn}.gz

The command looks good... but it does not work... it seems I get the 
compressed stuff displayed on my screen instead of being writtento the 
file. Isn't the > the correct redirection character so stdout goes to 
the specified file?

I usually end up with a file called {fn}.gz somewhere along the line.

This has got to be simple... what am I missing? :-)

Any suggestions?

Thank you :-)