zip Command: Tutorial & Examples

Compress files

The zip command in Linux is a command-line utility that is used to create, modify, and extract archive files in the ZIP format. The basic syntax for creating a zip archive is zip [options] archive_name file1 file2 file3...

When you run the zip command followed by an archive name and a list of files or directories, it will create a new archive file with the specified name and compress the specified files or directories into that archive.

For example, if you want to create a zip archive of the files file1.txt, file2.txt, and file3.txt and name it archive.zip, the command would be zip archive.zip file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

The zip command also has several options that can be used to modify the behavior of the command, such as:

  • -r option to recursively compress all files in a directory
  • -9 option to compress files using maximum compression level
  • -u option to update an existing archive
  • -d option to delete files from an archive
  • -v option to display the progress of the compression

The unzip command can be used to extract archive files in the ZIP format. zip and unzip are commonly used to compress and extract files on Linux systems, they are widely supported and can be used to compress and extract files in a cross-platform manner.

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