If not, just do a search and install them as appropriate for your Linux distribution. Depending on your installation, you can either use “yum”, or “apt-get” to check and see if they’re installed or not as shown here: The relevant packages for creating and extracting zip files are just “zip” and “unzip”. Verifying whether or not the Packages are Installed So if you’re offering a download to the general public on your Linux server, it’s useful to know how to zip and unzip files.

The layperson knows nothing about “tar” and “gz”. Software downloads are very often distributed through this format as well. Today though, “zip” is the common name given by laymen for archived and compressed files. Some of us might be familiar with the old “PKZIP” utility that created zip files almost 3 decades ago. Traditionally, these have been performed by two separate packages in Linux, which is why you often see archived and compressed files ending with something like “tar.gz”. However, most people are readily familiar with the “zip” format which does two things – archives a number of files or folders into a single file, and compresses them. There are many different archiving solutions for both Windows and Linux. This isn't unique to zip you can get documentation for most commands this way.How to Zip and Unzip a Folder in Linux with Subdirectories Posted on April 11, 2017 The zip command comes with documentation telling you about all of its (many) options type man zip to see that documentation. You can also tell zip to not store the paths with the -j/ -junk-paths option. As peterph points out in his comment, this is usually seen as a good thing: extracting the zip will neatly store all the extracted files in one subdirectory. Note that the produced zip will contain the directory structure as well as the files. Where mydir is the directory containing your files.

Other shells have different ways (or none at all) of including dotfiles.Īlternatively, zip also has a -r (recursive) option to do entire directory trees at once (and not have to worry about the dotfile problem): zip -r myfiles.zip mydir If not, in bash, if you shopt -s dotglob it will (but will still exclude.

Note that * by default doesn't match files beginning with a dot (neither does *.*). So it matches foo.png, because that's zero or more characters (seven, to be exact).

* matches zero or more characters-including a dot. You can just use * there is no need for *.*.

Zip folder in linux