how do I zip a whole folder tree in unix, but only certain files?

Question

Hi everyone,

I've been stuck on a little unix command line problem.

I have a website folder (4gb) I need to grab a copy of, but just the .php, .html, .js and .css files (which is only a couple hundred kb).

I'm thinking ideally, there is a way to zip or tar a whole folder but only grabbing certain file extensions, while retaining subfolder structures. Is this possible and if so, how?

I did try doing a whole zip, then going through and excluding certain files but it seemed a bit excessive.

I'm kinda new to unix.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could write a shell script to copy files based on a pattern/expression into a new folder, zip the contents and then delete the folder. Now, as for the actual syntax of it, ill leave that to you :D.

Answer 2

Use find and grep to generate the file list, then pipe that into zip

e.g.

find . | egrep "\.(html|css|js|php)" | zip -@ test.zip

(-@ tells zip to read a file list from stdin)

Answer 3

you may want to use find(GNU) to find all your php,html etc files.then tar them up

find /path -type f \( -iname "*.php" -o -iname "*.css" -o -iname "*.js" -o -iname "*.ext" \) -exec tar -r --file=test.tar "{}" +;

after that you can zip it up

Answer 4

Switch into the website folder, then run

zip -R foo '*.php' '*.html' '*.js' '*.css'

You can also run this from outside the website folder:

zip -r foo website_folder -i '*.php' '*.html' '*.js' '*.css'

Answer 5

This is how I managed to do it, but I also like ghostdog74's version.

tar -czvf archive.tgz `find  test/ | egrep ".*\.html|.*\.php"`

You can add extra extensions by adding them to the regex.

Answer 6

I liked Nick's answer, but, since this is a programming site, why not use ant to do this. :)

Then you can put in a parameter so that different types of files can be zipped up.

http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/zip.html