zip

The zip program is used to package and compress files.

zip is a compression and file packaging utility for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, Windows 9x/NT/XP, Minix, Atari, Macintosh, Amiga, and Acorn RISC OS. It is analogous to a combination of the Unix commands tarand compress, and it is compatible with PKZIP.

A separate companion program, unzip, unpacks and uncompresses ziparchives. The zip and unzip programs can work with archives produced by PKZIP (supporting most PKZIP features up to PKZIP version 4.6), and PKZIP and PKUNZIP can work with archives produced by zip (with some exceptions).

zip supports macOS X, and on that OS, most Unix features are the same.

zip is useful for packaging a set of files for distribution, for archiving files, and for saving disk space by temporarily compressing unused files or directories.

The zip program puts one or more compressed files into a single ziparchive, along with information about the files (name, path, date, time of last modification, protection, and check information to verify file integrity). An entire directory structure can be packed into a zip archive with a single command. Compression ratios of 2:1 to 3:1 are common for text files. zip has one compression method (deflation) and can also store files without compression. (If bzip2 support is added, zip can also compress using bzip2 compression, but such entries require a reasonably modern unzip to decompress. When bzip2 compression is selected, it replaces deflation as the default method.) zip automatically chooses the better of the two (deflation or store or, if bzip2 is selected, bzip2 or store) for each file to be compressed.

The basic command format is:

zip options archive inpath inpath ...

...where archive is a new or existing zip archive and inpath is a directory or file path optionally including wildcards. When given the name of an existing zip archive, zip will replace identically named entries in the zip archive (matching the relative names as stored in the archive) or add entries for new names. For example, if foo.zip exists and contains foo/file1 and foo/file2, and the directory foo contains the files foo/file1 and foo/file3, then:

zip -r foo.zip foo

or more concisely:

zip -r foo foo

...will replace foo/file1 in foo.zip and add foo/file3 to foo.zip. After this, foo.zip contains foo/file1, foo/file2, and foo/file3, with foo/file2 unchanged from before.

So if before the zip command is executed foo.zip has:

foo/file1 
foo/file2

and directory foo has:

file1 
file3

then foo.zip will have:

foo/file1 
foo/file2 
foo/file3

...where foo/file1 is replaced and foo/file3 is new.

If a file list is specified as -@, zip takes the list of input files from standard input instead of from the command line. For example,

zip -@ foo

...will store the files listed, one per line on standard input, in the archive foo.zip.

Under Unix, this option can be used to powerful effect in conjunction with the find command. For example, to archive all the C source files in the current directory and its subdirectories:

find . -name "*.[ch]" -print | zip source -@

(note that the pattern must be quoted to keep the shell from expanding it).

Streaming input and output. zip will also accept a single dash ("-") as the zip file name, in which case it will write the zip file to standard output, allowing the output to be piped to another program. For example:

zip -r - . | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=16k

...would write the zip output directly to a tape with the specified block size for the purpose of backing up the current directory.

zip also accepts a single dash ("-") as the name of a file to be compressed, in which case it will read the file from standard input, allowing zip to take input from another program. For example:

tar cf - . | zip backup -

...would compress the output of the tar command for the purpose of backing up the current directory. This generally produces better compression than the previous example using the -r option because zipcan take advantage of redundancy between files. The backup can be restored using the command:

unzip -p backup | tar xf -

When no zip file name is given and stdout is not a terminal, zip acts as a filter, compressing standard input to standard output. For example,

tar cf - . | zip | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=16k

...is equivalent to

tar cf - . | zip - - | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=16k

zip archives created in this manner can be extracted with the program funzip that is provided in the unzip package, or by gunzip that is provided in the gzip package (but some installations of gunzip may not support this if zip used the Zip64 extensions). For example:

dd if=/dev/nrst0 ibs=16k | funzip | tar xvf -

The stream can also be saved to a file and unzip used.

If Zip64 support for large files and archives is enabled and zip is used as a filter, zip creates a Zip64 archive that requires a PKZIP 4.5 or later compatible unzip to read the file. To avoid amgibuities in the zip file structure as defined in the current zip standard (PKWARE AppNote) where the decision to use Zip64 needs to be made before data is written for the entry, but for a stream the size of the data is not known at that point. If the data is known to be smaller than 4 GB, the option -fz- can be used to prevent use of Zip64, but zip will exit with an error if Zip64 was in fact needed. zip 3 and unzip 6 and later can read archives with Zip64 entries. Also, zip removes the Zip64 extensions if not needed when archive entries are copied (see the -U (--copy) option).

When directing the output to another file, note that all options should be before the redirection including -x. For example:

zip archive "*.h" "*.c" -x donotinclude.h orthis.h > tofile

Please note that -@ lists do not work on macOS.

When changing an existing zip archive, zip will write a temporary file with the new contents, and only replace the old one when the process of creating the new version has been completed without error.

If the name of the zip archive does not contain an extension, the extension .zip is added. If the name already contains an extension other than .zip, the existing extension is kept unchanged. However, split archives (archives split over multiple files) require the .zip extension on the last split.

When zip starts, it scans for files to process (if needed). If this scan takes longer than about 5 seconds, zip displays a "Scanning files" message and start displaying progress dots every 2 seconds or every so many entries processed, whichever takes longer. If there is more than 2 seconds between dots it could indicate that finding each file is taking time and could mean a slow network connection for example. (Actually the initial file scan is a two-step process where the directory scan is followed by a sort and these two steps are separated with a space in the dots. If updating an existing archive, a space also appears between the existing file scan and the new file scan.) The scanning files dots are not controlled by the -ds dot size option, but the dots are turned off by the -q quiet option. The -sf show files option can be used to scan for files and get the list of files scanned without actually processing them.

If zip is not able to read a file, it issues a warning but continues. See the -MM option below for more on how zip handles patterns that are not matched and files that are not readable. If some files were skipped, a warning is issued at the end of the zip operation noting how many files were read and how many skipped.

zip now supports two distinct types of command modes, external and internal. The external modes (add, update, and freshen) read files from the file system (as well as from an existing archive) while the internal modes (delete and copy) operate exclusively on entries in an existing archive.

The new File Sync option (-FS) is also considered a new mode, though it is similar to update. This mode synchronizes the archive with the files on the OS, only replacing files in the archive if the file time or size of the OS file is different, adding new files, and deleting entries from the archive where there is no matching file. As this mode can delete entries from the archive, consider making a backup copy of the archive.

zip version 3.0 and later can create split archives. A split archive is a standard zip archive split over multiple files. (Note that split archives are not just archives split in to pieces, as the offsets of entries are now based on the start of each split. Concatenating the pieces together will invalidate these offsets, but unzip can usually deal with it. zip will usually refuse to process such a spliced archive unless the -FF fix option is used to fix the offsets.)

One use of split archives is storing a large archive on multiple removable media. For a split archive with 20 split files the files are typically named (replace ARCHIVE with the name of your archive) ARCHIVE.z01, ARCHIVE.z02, ..., ARCHIVE.z19, ARCHIVE.zip. Note that the last file is the .zip file. In contrast, spanned archives are the original multi-disk archive generally requiring floppy disks and using volume labels to store disk numbers. zip supports split archives but not spanned archives, though a procedure exists for converting split archives of the right size to spanned archives. The reverse is also true, where each file of a spanned archive can be copied to files with the above names to create a split archive.

Use -s to set the split size and create a split archive. The size is given as a number followed optionally by one of k (kB), m (MB), g (GB), or t(TB) (the default is m). The -sp option can be used to pause zip between splits to allow changing removable media, for example, but read the descriptions and warnings for both -s and -sp below.

Though zip does not update split archives, zip provides the new option -O (--output-file or --out) to allow split archives to be updated and saved in a new archive. For example,

zip inarchive.zip foo.c bar.c --out outarchive.zip

...reads archive inarchive.zip, even if split, adds the files foo.c and bar.c, and writes the resulting archive to outarchive.zip. If inarchive.zip is split then outarchive.zip defaults to the same split size. Be aware that if outarchive.zip and any split files that are created with it already exist, these are always overwritten as needed without warning. This may be changed in the future.

Though the zip standard requires storing paths in an archive using a specific character set, in practice zips have stored paths in archives in whatever the local character set is. Problems can occur when an archive is created or updated on a system using one character set and then extracted on another system using a different character set. When compiled with Unicode support enabled on platforms that support wide characters, zip now stores, in addition to the standard local path for backward compatibility, the UTF-8 translation of the path. This provides a common universal character set for storing paths that allows these paths to be fully extracted on other systems that support Unicode and to match as close as possible on systems that don't.

On Win32 systems where paths are internally stored as Unicode but represented in the local character set, it's possible that some paths will be skipped during a local character set directory scan. zip with Unicode support now can read and store these paths. Note that Win 9x systems and FAT file systems don't fully support Unicode.

Be aware that console windows on Win32 and Unix, for example, sometimes don't accurately show all characters due to how each operating system switches in character sets for display. However, directory navigation tools should show the correct paths if the needed fonts are loaded.

This version of zip has updated command line processing and support for long options.

Short options take the form:

-s[-][s[-]...][value][=value][ value]

...where s is a one or two character short option. A short option that takes a value is last in an argument and anything after it is taken as the value. If the option can be negated and "-" immediately follows the option, the option is negated. Short options can also be given as separate arguments

-s[-][value][=value][ value] -s[-][value][=value][ value] ...

Short options in general take values either as part of the same argument or as the following argument. An optional = is also supported. So -ttmmddyyyy, -tt=mmddyyyy, and -tt mmddyyyy all work. The -x and -i options accept lists of values and use a slightly different format described below. See the -x and -i options.

Long options take the form

--longoption[-][=value][ value]

where the option starts with --, has a multicharacter name, can include a trailing dash to negate the option (if the option supports it), and can have a value (option argument) specified by preceding it with = (no spaces). Values can also follow the argument. So --before-date=mmddyyyy and --before-date mmddyyyy both work.

Long option names can be shortened to the shortest unique abbreviation. See the option descriptions below for which support long options. To avoid confusion, avoid abbreviating a negatable option with an embedded dash ("-") at the dash if you plan to negate it (the parser would consider a trailing dash, such as for the option --some-optionusing --some- as the option, as part of the name rather than a negating dash). This may be changed to force the last dash in --some- to be negating in the future.

zip [-aABcdDeEfFghjklLmoqrRSTuvVwXyz!@$] [--longoption...]  [-b path] 
    [-n suffixes] [-t date] [-tt date] [zipfile[file...]]  [-xi list]

zip -b /tmp stuff *

zip -d foo foo/tom/junk foo/harry/\* \*.o

zip -d foo foo/tom/junk "foo/harry/*" "*.o"

zip -qdgds 10m

ZIPOPT="-D"; export ZIPOPT

-x file file ... @

zip -r foofull .

zip -r foofull . -DF --out foonew

zip -f foo

zip -F foo --out foofix

zip -FF foo --out foofixfix

zip -r foo . -i \*.c

pkzip -rP foo *.c

zip -r foo . -i dir/\*

zip -r foo . -i "dir/*"

zip -r foo . -i dir/

zip -r foo . --include \*.c

zip -i \*.c @ -r foo .

zip -i\*.c -r foo .

zip --include=\*.c -r foo .

zip -r foo  . -i@include.lst

zip -rn .Z:.zip:.tiff:.gif:.snd  foo foo

setenv ZIPOPT "-n .gif:.zip"

zip -n : foo

zip -o foo

zip -s 2g cd-split.zip --out dvd-split.zip

zip -s 0 split.zip --out unsplit.zip

zip -r foo.zip foo

zip -r foo foo

zip -r foo foo1 foo2

zip -R foo "*.c"

pkzip -rP foo *.c

zip -R foo/*

zip -R */bar.c

zip -s 670m -r foo bar

zip -s 0 split.zip --out single.zip

zip -rt 12071991 infamy foo

zip -rt 1991-12-07 infamy foo

zip -rtt 11301995 infamy foo

zip -rtt 1995-11-30 infamy foo

zip archive file1 file2 -T -TT "./unzip -tqq"

zip -u stuff *

zip inarchive "*.c" --copy --out outarchive

zip inarchive --out outarchive

zip archive -sU -UN=e

zip archive dir -r -UN=UTF8

/foo/bar/dir/file1.c/foo/bar/file2.c

/foo/bar/*

zip -r foo foo -x \*.o

zip -r foo foo -x@exclude.lst

zip -r foo foo --exclude \*.o

zip -r foo foo --exclude @exclude.lst

zip -r foo foo -x \*.o \*.c

zip -r foo foo -x\*.o

zip -z foo < foowhat

zip -Z bzip2 foo bar.c

zip -Zb foo bar.c

zip -$ foo a: c:bar

zip uses the following environment variables:

On Risc and VMS, there are additional special environment variables; consult your documentation for details.

zip stuff *

Creates the archive stuff.zip (assuming it does not exist) and puts all the files in the current directory in it, in compressed form (the .zip suffix is added automatically, unless the archive name contains a dot already; this allows the explicit specification of other suffixes).

zip stuff .* *

The same as the above command, but also includes files beginning with a dot (except for the special directory names "." and "..".

zip -r foo foo

Zips the entire subdirectory foo into an archive, foo.zip, and records the name of the directory with each file.

zip -j foo foo/*

Same as the above command, but unlike -r, the -j option will not record the name of the directory, just the names of the files themselves.

zip -s 2g -r split.zip foo

Creates a split archive of the directory foo with splits no bigger than 2 GB each. If foo contained 5 GB of contents and the contents were stored in the split archive without compression (to make this example simple), this would create three splits, split.z01 at 2 GB, split.z02 at 2 GB, and split.zip at a little over 1 GB.