It’s useful to know how to compress a file or folder using the terminal for those times that you’re working remotely on a server and don’t have access to the usual desktop compression tools. We can use the zip command to do this.
You’ll likely already have zip installed as part of your chosen distribution. If you don’t have it then you can grab it using the appropriate package manager:
Ubuntu
sudo apt install zip
Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora
sudo yum install zip
Arch / Manjaro
sudo pacman -S zip
Once installed, the command needed to zip a file or folder is pretty simple. It takes the following syntax:
zip [option] [archive_name.zip] [file_or_folder_to_compress]
If, for example, we’re currently in a directory that contains a folder called “log_files” and we want to compress that folder we could use the following command:
zip -r archive.zip log_files
Here we’ve specified the name of the new .zip file followed by the actual directory to zip up. We’re also passing the -r option which simply stands for “recursive”. This means that the zip file will include the entire directory tree of the specified folder.
Remember that the above command assumes that we’re in the same directory as the file or folder that we want to zip up. If we’re somewhere else within the file system, then we need to provide the full path of the folder that we want to zip up:
zip -r archive.zip /path/to/folder
To compress a file rather than a folder, we just specify the file name instead of the folder name. In this example, the -r option isn’t needed as we’re dealing with a single file:
zip archive.zip /path/to/file.log
There’s plenty more you can do with this command by utilising the available options when issuing the command. Take a look at the manual pages for zip to find out more:
man zip
The zip command is especially useful for archiving log files or compressing entire directories so that they can be downloaded or transferred across servers. Give it a go!