selectively gzip large files in a directory

Question

I have several directories with files of various sizes. I would like to archive only those files over 100 megabytes in size. Any ideas of a simple command line argument to do this?

Answer 1

Like this

find . -size +100M -exec gzip {} \;

If you are thinking of running it regularly, you may wish to exclude already gzipped files like this

find . ! -name "*.gz" -size +100M -exec gzip {} \;

And if you have lots of big files and (say) a quad core CPU, you could do 4 at a time like this

find . -size +100M | xargs -n 1 -P 4 gzip

Answer 2

Check out the -size option to the find command.

Documentation: find(1)