Gzip all plain-text files

[niemasd]

It would be good if we compressed all plain-text files using gzip (any compression would probably be fine, but I like gzip because it's ready-to-go on many systems and tools, and it probably works well-enough). Any commands that require an unzipped file can simply be rewritten to use a FIFO instead using process subtitution, e.g. the following:

my_program data.txt

can be written as follows to use a FIFO:

my_program <(zcat data.txt.gz)

[niemasd]

Also, pro-tip: you can use pigz to compress files using multithreading to speed things up, e.g. the following (-9 does level 9 compression, and -p 8 uses 8 threads; you can use however many you want):

pigz -9 -p 8 data.txt

[rob-knight]

This would be useful to do in general.