How to use 7z to archive all the files and directories (including hidden ones) in a directory?
TL;DR
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/.
More examples
Example directory structure
test1
├── .hidden
└── normal.txt
0 directories, 2 files
Root folder with all its contents.
7za a test1_a.7z ~/test1/
gives
Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2017-08-06 09:23:51 D.... 0 0 test1 2017-08-06 09:23:44 ....A 0 0 test1/.hidden 2017-08-06 09:23:51 ....A 0 0 test1/normal.txt ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2017-08-06 09:23:51 0 0 2 files, 1 folders
No root folder and no hidden files
7za a test1_b.7z ~/test1/*
gives
Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2017-08-06 09:23:51 ....A 0 0 normal.txt ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2017-08-06 09:23:51 0 0 1 files
No root folder but hidden files are included (it's what we usually want)
7za a test1_c.7z ~/test1/.
gives
Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2017-08-06 09:23:44 ....A 0 0 .hidden 2017-08-06 09:23:51 ....A 0 0 normal.txt ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------ 2017-08-06 09:23:51 0 0 2 files
If you want the contents of a single directory, an easy method is to change to it first:
cd ~/my/folder
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z .
What you saw is that *
expands to the list of names of files that don't begin with a .
. That's the documented behavior, and it's the main reason why files whose name begins with a .
are said to be hidden (the other is that ls
doesn't show them by default).
There's no really convenient portable way to list all files in a directory. You can use
~/my/folder/..?* ~/my/folder/.[!.]* ~/my/folder/*
but if there is no file matching one of the patterns then the pattern will remain unexpanded. In bash, you can set the dotglob
option to avoid treating a leading .
specially (.
and ..
are still excluded from the matches):
shopt -s dotglob
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/*
In ksh, or in bash if you set the extglob
option (or in zsh if you set the ksh_glob
option), you can write a pattern that matches all files except .
and ..
:
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/@(..?*|.[!.]*|*)
In zsh, there's a simpler way of saying that .
must not be treated specially in a pattern:
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z ~/my/folder/*(D)
No, *
is not supposed to return all files. It returns only visible ones.
The easier solution is:
cd ~/my/folder
7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=off ~/my/folder.7z .