How To Compress Zip File In Linux Shell Command Compressing Zip Files

today i wanted to know how to compress zip files in linux. i wanted to copy a whole directory and compres it so i can download to my computer.

well, if you want to know how you can compress files or directories to zip format, all you have to do is send this shell command in linux:

zip -r new_file_name.zip /path/to/directory

FORMAT: zip -r [NEW FILE NAME] [TARGET]

to unzip it you can send this command in the unix shell:

unzip new_file_name.zip

here's more information about zip in linux or you can just send the man command:

man zip

NAME

zip, zipcloak, zipnote, zipsplit - package and compress (archive) files

SYNOPSIS

zip [-aABcdDeEfFghjklLmoqrRSTuvVwXyz!@$] [-b path] [-n suffixes] [-t mmddyyyy]

[-tt mmddyyyy] [ zipfile [ file1 file2 ...]] [-xi list]

zipcloak [-dhL] [-b path] zipfile

zipnote [-hwL] [-b path] zipfile

zipsplit [-hiLpst] [-n size] [-b path] zipfile

DESCRIPTION

zip is a compression and file packaging utility for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, Windows

NT, Minix, Atari and Macintosh, Amiga and Acorn RISC OS.

It is analogous to a combination of the UNIX commands tar(1) and compress(1) and is

compatible with PKZIP (Phil KatzÃƒÂ¢s ZIP for MSDOS systems).

A companion program (unzip(1L)), unpacks zip archives. The zip and unzip(1L) pro-

grams can work with archives produced by PKZIP, and PKZIP and PKUNZIP can work with

archives produced by zip. zip version 2.31 is compatible with PKZIP 2.04. Note

that PKUNZIP 1.10 cannot extract files produced by PKZIP 2.04 or zip 2.31. You must

use PKUNZIP 2.04g or unzip 5.0p1 (or later versions) to extract them.

For a brief help on zip and unzip, run each without specifying any parameters on

the command line.

The program is useful for packaging a set of files for distribution; for archiving

files; and for saving disk space by temporarily compressing unused files or direc-

tories.

The zip program puts one or more compressed files into a single zip archive, along

with information about the files (name, path, date, time of last modification, pro-

tection, and check information to verify file integrity). An entire directory

structure can be packed into a zip archive with a single command. Compression

ratios of 2:1 to 3:1 are common for text files. zip has one compression method

(deflation) and can also store files without compression. zip automatically

chooses the better of the two for each file to be compressed.

When given the name of an existing zip archive, zip will replace identically named

entries in the zip archive or add entries for new names. For example, if foo.zip

exists and contains foo/file1 and foo/file2, and the directory foo contains the

files foo/file1 and foo/file3, then:

zip -r foo foo

will replace foo/file1 in foo.zip and add foo/file3 to foo.zip. After this,

foo.zip contains foo/file1, foo/file2, and foo/file3, with foo/file2 unchanged from

before.

If the file list is specified as -@, [Not on MacOS] zip takes the list of input

files from standard input. Under UNIX, this option can be used to powerful effect

in conjunction with the find(1) command. For example, to archive all the C source

files in the current directory and its subdirectories:

find . -name "*.[ch]" -print | zip source -@

(note that the pattern must be quoted to keep the shell from expanding it). zip

will also accept a single dash ("-") as the zip file name, in which case it will

write the zip file to standard output, allowing the output to be piped to another

program. For example:

zip -r - . | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=16k

would write the zip output directly to a tape with the specified block size for the

purpose of backing up the current directory.

zip also accepts a single dash ("-") as the name of a file to be compressed, in

which case it will read the file from standard input, allowing zip to take input

from another program. For example:

tar cf - . | zip backup -

would compress the output of the tar command for the purpose of backing up the cur-

rent directory. This generally produces better compression than the previous exam-

ple using the -r option, because zip can take advantage of redundancy between

files. The backup can be restored using the command

unzip -p backup | tar xf -

When no zip file name is given and stdout is not a terminal, zip acts as a filter,

compressing standard input to standard output. For example,

tar cf - . | zip | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=16k

is equivalent to

tar cf - . | zip - - | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=16k

zip archives created in this manner can be extracted with the program funzip which

is provided in the unzip package, or by gunzip which is provided in the gzip pack-

age. For example:

dd if=/dev/nrst0 ibs=16k | funzip | tar xvf -

When changing an existing zip archive, zip will write a temporary file with the new

contents, and only replace the old one when the process of creating the new version

has been completed without error.

If the name of the zip archive does not contain an extension, the extension .zip is

added. If the name already contains an extension other than .zip the existing

extension is kept unchanged.

OPTIONS

-a [Systems using EBCDIC] Translate file to ASCII format.

-A Adjust self-extracting executable archive. A self-extracting executable

archive is created by prepending the SFX stub to an existing archive. The -A

option tells zip to adjust the entry offsets stored in the archive to take

into account this "preamble" data.

Note: self-extracting archives for the Amiga are a special case. At present, only

the Amiga port of Zip is capable of adjusting or updating these without corrupting

them. -J can be used to remove the SFX stub if other updates need to be made.

-B [VM/CMS and MVS] force file to be read binary (default is text).

-Bn [TANDEM] set Edit/Enscribe formatting options with n defined as

bit 0: DonÃƒÂ¢t add delimiter (Edit/Enscribe)

bit 1: Use LF rather than CR/LF as delimiter (Edit/Enscribe)

bit 2: Space fill record to maximum record length (Enscribe)

bit 3: Trim trailing space (Enscribe)

bit 8: Force 30K (Expand) large read for unstructured files

-b path

Use the specified path for the temporary zip archive. For example:

zip -b /tmp stuff *

will put the temporary zip archive in the directory /tmp, copying over

stuff.zip to the current directory when done. This option is only useful

when updating an existing archive, and the file system containing this old

archive does not have enough space to hold both old and new archives at the

same time.

-c Add one-line comments for each file. File operations (adding, updating) are

done first, and the user is then prompted for a one-line comment for each

file. Enter the comment followed by return, or just return for no comment.

-d Remove (delete) entries from a zip archive. For example:

zip -d foo foo/tom/junk foo/harry/* *.o

will remove the entry foo/tom/junk, all of the files that start with

foo/harry/, and all of the files that end with .o (in any path). Note that

shell pathname expansion has been inhibited with backslashes, so that zip

can see the asterisks, enabling zip to match on the contents of the zip

archive instead of the contents of the current directory.

Under systems where the shell does not expand wildcards, such as MSDOS, the

backslashes are not needed. The above would then be

zip -d foo foo/tom/junk foo/harry/* *.o

Under MSDOS, -d is case sensitive when it matches names in the zip archive.

This requires that file names be entered in upper case if they were zipped

by PKZIP on an MSDOS system.

-df [MacOS] Include only data-fork of files zipped into the archive. Good for

exporting files to foreign operating-systems. Resource-forks will be

ignored at all.

-D Do not create entries in the zip archive for directories. Directory entries

are created by default so that their attributes can be saved in the zip

archive. The environment variable ZIPOPT can be used to change the default

options. For example under Unix with sh:

ZIPOPT="-D"; export ZIPOPT

(The variable ZIPOPT can be used for any option except -i and -x and can

include several options.) The option -D is a shorthand for -x "*/" but the

latter cannot be set as default in the ZIPOPT environment variable.

-e Encrypt the contents of the zip archive using a password which is entered on

the terminal in response to a prompt (this will not be echoed; if standard

error is not a tty, zip will exit with an error). The password prompt is

repeated to save the user from typing errors.

-E [OS/2] Use the .LONGNAME Extended Attribute (if found) as filename.

-f Replace (freshen) an existing entry in the zip archive only if it has been

modified more recently than the version already in the zip archive; unlike

the update option (-u) this will not add files that are not already in the

zip archive. For example:

zip -f foo

This command should be run from the same directory from which the original

zip command was run, since paths stored in zip archives are always relative.

Note that the timezone environment variable TZ should be set according to

the local timezone in order for the -f , -u and -o options to work cor-

rectly.

The reasons behind this are somewhat subtle but have to do with the differ-

ences between the Unix-format file times (always in GMT) and most of the

other operating systems (always local time) and the necessity to compare the

two. A typical TZ value is ÃƒÂ¢ÃƒÂ¢MET-1MESTÃƒÂ¢ÃƒÂ¢ (Middle European time with auto-

matic adjustment for ÃƒÂ¢ÃƒÂ¢summertimeÃƒÂ¢ÃƒÂ¢ or Daylight Savings Time).

-F Fix the zip archive. This option can be used if some portions of the archive

are missing. It is not guaranteed to work, so you MUST make a backup of the

original archive first.

When doubled as in -FF the compressed sizes given inside the damaged archive

are not trusted and zip scans for special signatures to identify the limits

between the archive members. The single -F is more reliable if the archive

is not too much damaged, for example if it has only been truncated, so try

this option first.

Neither option will recover archives that have been incorrectly transferred

in ascii mode instead of binary. After the repair, the -t option of unzip

may show that some files have a bad CRC. Such files cannot be recovered; you

can remove them from the archive using the -d option of zip.

-g Grow (append to) the specified zip archive, instead of creating a new one.

If this operation fails, zip attempts to restore the archive to its original

state. If the restoration fails, the archive might become corrupted. This

option is ignored when thereÃƒÂ¢s no existing archive or when at least one

archive member must be updated or deleted.

-h Display the zip help information (this also appears if zip is run with no

arguments).

-i files

Include only the specified files, as in:

zip -r foo . -i *.c

which will include only the files that end in .c in the current directory

and its subdirectories. (Note for PKZIP users: the equivalent command is

pkzip -rP foo *.c

PKZIP does not allow recursion in directories other than the current one.)

The backslash avoids the shell filename substitution, so that the name

matching is performed by zip at all directory levels. Not escaping wild-

cards on shells that do wildcard substitution before zip gets the command

line may seem to work but files in subdirectories matching the pattern will

never be checked and so not matched. For shells, such as Win32 command

prompts, that do not replace file patterns containing wildcards with the

respective file names, zip will do the recursion and escaping the wildcards

is not needed.

Also possible:

zip -r foo . -i@include.lst

which will only include the files in the current directory and its subdirec-

tories that match the patterns in the file include.lst.

-I [Acorn RISC OS] DonÃƒÂ¢t scan through Image files. When used, zip will not

consider Image files (eg. DOS partitions or Spark archives when SparkFS is

loaded) as directories but will store them as single files.

For example, if you have SparkFS loaded, zipping a Spark archive will result

in a zipfile containing a directory (and its content) while using the ÃƒÂ¢IÃƒÂ¢

option will result in a zipfile containing a Spark archive. Obviously this

second case will also be obtained (without the ÃƒÂ¢IÃƒÂ¢ option) if SparkFS isnÃƒÂ¢t

loaded.

-j Store just the name of a saved file (junk the path), and do not store direc-

tory names. By default, zip will store the full path (relative to the cur-

rent path).

-jj [MacOS] record Fullpath (+ Volname). The complete path including volume will

be stored. By default the relative path will be stored.

-J Strip any prepended data (e.g. a SFX stub) from the archive.

-k Attempt to convert the names and paths to conform to MSDOS, store only the

MSDOS attribute (just the user write attribute from UNIX), and mark the

entry as made under MSDOS (even though it was not); for compatibility with

PKUNZIP under MSDOS which cannot handle certain names such as those with two

dots.

-l Translate the Unix end-of-line character LF into the MSDOS convention CR LF.

This option should not be used on binary files. This option can be used on

Unix if the zip file is intended for PKUNZIP under MSDOS. If the input files

already contain CR LF, this option adds an extra CR. This ensures that unzip

-a on Unix will get back an exact copy of the original file, to undo the

effect of zip -l. See the note on binary detection for -ll below.

-ll Translate the MSDOS end-of-line CR LF into Unix LF. This option should not

be used on binary files and a warning will be issued when a file is con-

verted that later is detected to be binary. This option can be used on

MSDOS if the zip file is intended for unzip under Unix.

In Zip 2.31 binary detection has been changed from a simple percentage of

binary characters being considered binary to a more selective method that

should consider files in many character sets, including UTF-8, that only

include text characters in that character set to be text. This allows unzip

-a to convert these files.

-L Display the zip license.

-m Move the specified files into the zip archive; actually, this deletes the

target directories/files after making the specified zip archive. If a direc-

tory becomes empty after removal of the files, the directory is also

removed. No deletions are done until zip has created the archive without

error. This is useful for conserving disk space, but is potentially danger-

ous so it is recommended to use it in combination with -T to test the

archive before removing all input files.

-n suffixes

Do not attempt to compress files named with the given suffixes. Such files

are simply stored (0% compression) in the output zip file, so that zip

doesnÃƒÂ¢t waste its time trying to compress them. The suffixes are separated

by either colons or semicolons. For example:

zip -rn .Z:.zip:.tiff:.gif:.snd foo foo

will copy everything from foo into foo.zip, but will store any files that

end in .Z, .zip, .tiff, .gif, or .snd without trying to compress them (image

and sound files often have their own specialized compression methods). By

default, zip does not compress files with extensions in the list

.Z:.zip:.zoo:.arc:.lzh:.arj. Such files are stored directly in the output

archive. The environment variable ZIPOPT can be used to change the default

options. For example under Unix with csh:

setenv ZIPOPT "-n .gif:.zip"

To attempt compression on all files, use:

zip -n : foo

The maximum compression option -9 also attempts compression on all files

regardless of extension.

On Acorn RISC OS systems the suffixes are actually filetypes (3 hex digit

format). By default, zip does not compress files with filetypes in the list

DDC:D96:68E (i.e. Archives, CFS files and PackDir files).

-N [Amiga, MacOS] Save Amiga or MacOS filenotes as zipfile comments. They can

be restored by using the -N option of unzip. If -c is used also, you are

prompted for comments only for those files that do not have filenotes.

-o Set the "last modified" time of the zip archive to the latest (oldest) "last

modified" time found among the entries in the zip archive. This can be used

without any other operations, if desired. For example:

zip -o foo

will change the last modified time of foo.zip to the latest time of the

entries in foo.zip.

-P password

use password to encrypt zipfile entries (if any). THIS IS INSECURE! Many

multi-user operating systems provide ways for any user to see the current

command line of any other user; even on stand-alone systems there is always

the threat of over-the-shoulder peeking. Storing the plaintext password as

part of a command line in an automated script is even worse. Whenever pos-

sible, use the non-echoing, interactive prompt to enter passwords. (And

where security is truly important, use strong encryption such as Pretty Good

Privacy instead of the relatively weak encryption provided by standard zip-

file utilities.)

-q Quiet mode; eliminate informational messages and comment prompts. (Useful,

for example, in shell scripts and background tasks).

-Qn [QDOS] store information about the file in the file header with n defined as

bit 0: DonÃƒÂ¢t add headers for any file

bit 1: Add headers for all files

bit 2: DonÃƒÂ¢t wait for interactive key press on exit

-r Travel the directory structure recursively; for example:

zip -r foo foo

In this case, all the files and directories in foo are saved in a zip

archive named foo.zip, including files with names starting with ".", since

the recursion does not use the shellÃƒÂ¢s file-name substitution mechanism. If

you wish to include only a specific subset of the files in directory foo and

its subdirectories, use the -i option to specify the pattern of files to be

included. You should not use -r with the name ".*", since that matches ".."

which will attempt to zip up the parent directory (probably not what was

intended).

-R Travel the directory structure recursively starting at the current direc-

tory; for example:

zip -R foo ÃƒÂ¢*.cÃƒÂ¢

In this case, all the files matching *.c in the tree starting at the current

directory are stored into a zip archive named foo.zip. Note for PKZIP

users: the equivalent command is

pkzip -rP foo *.c

-S [MSDOS, OS/2, WIN32 and ATARI] Include system and hidden files.

[MacOS] Includes finder invisible files, which are ignored otherwise.

-t mmddyyyy

Do not operate on files modified prior to the specified date, where mm is

the month (0-12), dd is the day of the month (1-31), and yyyy is the year.

The ISO 8601 date format yyyy-mm-dd is also accepted. For example:

zip -rt 12071991 infamy foo

zip -rt 1991-12-07 infamy foo

will add all the files in foo and its subdirectories that were last modified

on or after 7 December 1991, to the zip archive infamy.zip.

-tt mmddyyyy

Do not operate on files modified after or at the specified date, where mm is

the month (0-12), dd is the day of the month (1-31), and yyyy is the year.

The ISO 8601 date format yyyy-mm-dd is also accepted. For example:

zip -rtt 11301995 infamy foo

zip -rtt 1995-11-30 infamy foo

will add all the files in foo and its subdirectories that were last modified

before the 30 November 1995, to the zip archive infamy.zip.

-T Test the integrity of the new zip file. If the check fails, the old zip file

is unchanged and (with the -m option) no input files are removed.

-u Replace (update) an existing entry in the zip archive only if it has been

modified more recently than the version already in the zip archive. For

example:

zip -u stuff *

will add any new files in the current directory, and update any files which

have been modified since the zip archive stuff.zip was last created/modified

(note that zip will not try to pack stuff.zip into itself when you do this).

Note that the -u option with no arguments acts like the -f (freshen) option.

-v Verbose mode or print diagnostic version info.

Normally, when applied to real operations, this option enables the display

of a progress indicator during compression and requests verbose diagnostic

info about zipfile structure oddities.

When -v is the only command line argument, and either stdin or stdout is not

redirected to a file, a diagnostic screen is printed. In addition to the

help screen header with program name, version, and release date, some point-

ers to the Info-ZIP home and distribution sites are given. Then, it shows

information about the target environment (compiler type and version, OS ver-

sion, compilation date and the enabled optional features used to create the

zip executable.

-V [VMS] Save VMS file attributes and use portable form. zip archives created

with this option are truncated at EOF but still may not be usable on other

systems depending on the file types being zipped.

-VV [VMS] Save VMS file attributes. zip archives created with this option

include the entire file and should be able to recreate most VMS files on VMS

systems but these archives will generally not be usable on other systems.

-w [VMS] Append the version number of the files to the name, including multiple

versions of files. (default: use only the most recent version of a speci-

fied file).

-x files

Explicitly exclude the specified files, as in:

zip -r foo foo -x *.o

which will include the contents of foo in foo.zip while excluding all the

files that end in .o. The backslash avoids the shell filename substitution,

so that the name matching is performed by zip at all directory levels. If

you do not escape wildcards in patterns it may seem to work but files in

subdirectories will not be checked for matches.

Also possible:

zip -r foo foo -x@exclude.lst

which will include the contents of foo in foo.zip while excluding all the

files that match the patterns in the file exclude.lst (each file pattern on

a separate line).

-X Do not save extra file attributes (Extended Attributes on OS/2, uid/gid and

file times on Unix).

-y Store symbolic links as such in the zip archive, instead of compressing and

storing the file referred to by the link (UNIX only).

-z Prompt for a multi-line comment for the entire zip archive. The comment is

ended by a line containing just a period, or an end of file condition (^D on

UNIX, ^Z on MSDOS, OS/2, and VAX/VMS). The comment can be taken from a

file:

zip -z foo < foowhat

-# Regulate the speed of compression using the specified digit #, where -0

indicates no compression (store all files), -1 indicates the fastest com-

pression method (less compression) and -9 indicates the slowest compression

method (optimal compression, ignores the suffix list). The default compres-

sion level is -6.

-! [WIN32] Use priviliges (if granted) to obtain all aspects of WinNT security.

-@ Take the list of input files from standard input. Only one filename per

line.

-$ [MSDOS, OS/2, WIN32] Include the volume label for the drive holding the

first file to be compressed. If you want to include only the volume label

or to force a specific drive, use the drive name as first file name, as in:

zip -$ foo a: c:bar

EXAMPLES

The simplest example:

zip stuff *

creates the archive stuff.zip (assuming it does not exist) and puts all the files

in the current directory in it, in compressed form (the .zip suffix is added auto-

matically, unless that archive name given contains a dot already; this allows the

explicit specification of other suffixes).

Because of the way the shell does filename substitution, files starting with "."

are not included; to include these as well:

zip stuff .* *

Even this will not include any subdirectories from the current directory.

To zip up an entire directory, the command:

zip -r foo foo

creates the archive foo.zip, containing all the files and directories in the direc-

tory foo that is contained within the current directory.

You may want to make a zip archive that contains the files in foo, without record-

ing the directory name, foo. You can use the -j option to leave off the paths, as

in:

zip -j foo foo/*

If you are short on disk space, you might not have enough room to hold both the

original directory and the corresponding compressed zip archive. In this case, you

can create the archive in steps using the -m option. If foo contains the subdirec-

tories tom, dick, and harry, you can:

zip -rm foo foo/tom

zip -rm foo foo/dick

zip -rm foo foo/harry

where the first command creates foo.zip, and the next two add to it. At the com-

pletion of each zip command, the last created archive is deleted, making room for

the next zip command to function.

PATTERN MATCHING

This section applies only to UNIX, though the ?, *, and [] special characters are

implemented on other systems including MSDOS and Win32. Watch this space for

details on MSDOS and VMS operation.

The UNIX shells (sh(1) and csh(1)) do filename substitution on command arguments.

The special characters are:

? match any single character

* match any number of characters (including none)

[] match any character in the range indicated within the brackets (example:

[a-f], [0-9]).

When these characters are encountered (without being escaped with a backslash or

quotes), the shell will look for files relative to the current path that match the

pattern, and replace the argument with a list of the names that matched.

The zip program can do the same matching on names that are in the zip archive being

modified or, in the case of the -x (exclude) or -i (include) options, on the list

of files to be operated on, by using backslashes or quotes to tell the shell not to

do the name expansion. In general, when zip encounters a name in the list of files

to do, it first looks for the name in the file system. If it finds it, it then

adds it to the list of files to do. If it does not find it, it looks for the name

in the zip archive being modified (if it exists), using the pattern matching char-

acters described above, if present. For each match, it will add that name to the

list of files to be processed, unless this name matches one given with the -x

option, or does not match any name given with the -i option.

The pattern matching includes the path, and so patterns like *.o match names that

end in ".o", no matter what the path prefix is. Note that the backslash must pre-

cede every special character (i.e. ?*[]), or the entire argument must be enclosed

in double quotes ("").

In general, use backslash to make zip do the pattern matching with the -f (freshen)

and -d (delete) options, and sometimes after the -x (exclude) option when used with

an appropriate operation (add, -u, -f, or -d).

ENVIRONMENT

ZIPOPT contains default options that will be used when running zip

ZIP [Not on RISC OS and VMS] see ZIPOPT

Zip$Options

[RISC OS] see ZIPOPT

Zip$Exts

[RISC OS] contains extensions separated by a : that will cause native file-

names with one of the specified extensions to be added to the zip file with

basename and extension swapped. zip

ZIP_OPTS

[VMS] see ZIPOPT

What do you think?