How To Use the Zip Command Ubuntu Linux

Basic usage is simple, the man page doesn’t always get to the examples quickly so I thought I’d write about it for a quick reference.

Make sure it’s installed – this will install it on Debian or Ubuntu

apt-get install zip unzip

Output

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
unzip zip
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 419 kB of archives.
After this operation, 998 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main unzip amd64 6.0-9ubuntu1.5 [157 kB]
Get:2 http://us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main zip amd64 3.0-8 [262 kB]
Fetched 419 kB in 0s (8,201 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package unzip.
(Reading database … 155462 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack …/unzip_6.0-9ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb …
Unpacking unzip (6.0-9ubuntu1.5) …
Selecting previously unselected package zip.
Preparing to unpack …/archives/zip_3.0-8_amd64.deb …
Unpacking zip (3.0-8) …
Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) …
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.54ubuntu1.1) …
Setting up unzip (6.0-9ubuntu1.5) …
Setting up zip (3.0-8) …

 

To compress:

zip -r my_archive.zip file_1.doc file.txt file_2013_02_01.png

or to zip a directory

zip -r my_archive.zip folder1

 

Same as above but also add a password

zip -r --password BIGSECRET my_archive.zip folder1

 

To uncompress:

unzip my_archive.zip