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I have a large and complex nested folder structure on disk. Say,

Folder1
<many files>
  Subfolder1
  <many files>
  Subfolder2
  <many files>
  ...
  SubfolderNNN

Compressing all the files would take few hours, so I would like to set Compressed attribute only on folders. That would leave existing files unchanged, but new files added in the future would become compressed.

Is there a way to achieve that using compact.exe command line?

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  • A few hours, then I suggest you do it at nighttime. (Perhaps this is moere suited for Stackoverflow, voting for moving).
    – r4.
    Oct 18, 2013 at 8:58

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It may not be completely clear from the output of compact /?, but when you use compact /c C:\somefolder, only the folder's compressed attribute is set, while the files inside the folder keep their current compressed attribute unchanged.

What you want to do is:
compact /c Folder1 cd Folder1 for /f "delims=" %i in ('@dir /b /s /a:d') do compact /c "%i".

If you should later intend to compress all the files, repeat the latter two commands, but omit the /a:d.

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