Question

Suppose the structure:

/foo/bar/
        --file1
        --file2
        --file3
        --folder1
          --file4
        --folder2
          --file5

I want to run the unix zip utility, compressing the bar folder and all of it’s files and subfolders, from foo folder, but not have the bar folder inside the zip, using only command line.

If I try to use the -j argument, it doesn’t create the bar folder inside the zip as I want, but doesn’t create folder1 and folder2. Doing -rj doesn’t work.

(I know I can enter inside bar and do zip -r bar.zip . I want to know if it’s possible to accomplish what $/foo/bar/ zip -r bar.zip . but doing it from $/foo).

Answer 1

zip doesn’t have a -C (change directory) command like tar does

you can do:

cd folder1 && zip -r ../bar.zip *

from within a command line shell

or you can use bsdtar which is a version of tar from libarchive that can create zips

bsdtar cf bar.zip --format zip -C folder1 .

(this creates a folder called ./ — not sure a way around that)