find and compress

[eric stewart]

I have a directory with 986 files in it.
If I do find . -type f -exec compress -f {} \;
It will not work consistantly.
Here are the number of files compressed in 7 runs:
265, 784, 264, 519, 264, 264, 980.
Is there something about find and compress that do not go together?
This was uncovered when I was compressing files in a laarge file system.
If I use compress * in the current directory it compresses all the files.
If I go to the higher level directory (test) and use find test -type f ... It also does not compress all the files.
As a side note. Every once and a while compress will tell me that some of the files are already compressed.
DO my problems come about because the find command uses the directory list which compress updates because the inode of the compressed files would be different that the uncompressed?

[Rodney Hills]

I'm not sure of any issues with find and compress, but have you tried using
compressdir -f .

If you are running compress multiple times on the same directory, I think you might not get what you expect.

[eric stewart]

Rodney,
I did not know about compressdir when I was doing the find.
I have tried compressdir -f abd it also does not work.
I was not trying to do multile compress at the same time on the same directory.
Tx eric

[Rodney Hills]

I would try seperating into 2 commands-
find . -print >/tmp/myfiles
cat /tmp/myfiles | xargs -n1 compress -f

Maybe when the directory is large, find gets lost walking the directory when compress puts the compressed files back into the same directory.

[Chris Calabrese]

First, compress will not re-compress already compressed files, so that gets you:

find . -type f ! -name "*.Z" -exec compress {} \;

Next, compress will not
compress files for which
there is no advantage (i.e.,
the compressed version won't
actually be smaller). You can
override this with -f, or

find . -type f ! -name '*.Z" -exec compress -f {} \;

As for using xargs, that's
usually OK, but breaks down
when files have newline char's
in their names (admitedly rare).