Creating a zip

I didn't realize how to do this until just now so I thought I'd post about it. Suppose you have a directory on your box called "my_files" and you wish to compress it into a zip file. One level above the directory, use the following command

zip -r files.zip my_files/

cscgal

The Queen of DaniWeb

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19,421 posts since Feb 2002

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8 Years Ago

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that is so Windows...

Just kidding. That works great, but you can squeeze even more compression out of it if you use tar with bzip2 compression:

tar -cvjf files.tar.bz2 my_files/

Zip might get about 2x compression, but I've seen bzip2 get anywhere from 2x to 5x compression. If space is a concern, then I'd check it out.

alc6379

Cookie... That's it

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8 Years Ago

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yeah, the whole difference with tar.gz and bzip2 is that bzip2 gives you more compression, so file sizes are small, but bzip2 is a lot more resource intensive when decompressing. So when size is an issue, use bzip2.

Eico

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8 Years Ago

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I usually use a shoe horn, some baby oil, and a really big mallet. :p

TKS

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