How to Zip Files in Mac OS X
Ever wondered how to make a zip file in Mac OS X? We recently demonstrated how to password protect zip archives, but in the comments a reader asked a more simple yet completely valid question: “what about just making a standard zip file?” Well, making zip files on a Mac is easy, and with compression tools built directly into OS X there is no need to download additional software or add-ons, here’s how.
How to Make a Zip Archive in Mac OS X
You can use this to create zip files of files, folders, or both:
- Right-click on a file, folder, or files you want to zip
- Select “Compress Items”
- Find the newly created .zip archive in the same directory
If a single file is being zipped, the zip archive will maintain the standard file name but append the .zip extension. If more than one file is being zipped, the archive will be named “Archive.zip”, and if multiple archives are created, they will be named successively “Archive 2.zip” and so on.
Opening zip files is even easier, just double-click on the archive and it’ll expand automatically with Archive Utility.
Zip archives can also be created from the command line by using the terminal command zip with the following syntax:
zip archive.zip file.txt
Seriously?
Need a post “How to create new Folder in Mac OS”
Command+N
You know everything, you are amazing!
Welp OS XDaily, you better shut down your website, ArtFeel knew this one!
Pretty useless, though. 4,125,328 bytes compressed to 3,998,283 bytes
Is it possible to create a Zip-Archiv without the hidden MACOSX Folder?
Greetings Henning
You should publish something more useful…Instead of how to create a ZIP file why not “how to create a splitted ZIP file” which is sometimes needed (Try to upload a file bigger than 100Mb to M$ Skydrive)….
@Henning
You can try adding -rf (–datafork)
zip -df foo.zip foo.txt
To exclude certain files. Use: -x “xxxx”
For your example it would be:
zip foo.zip foo.txt -x “*__MACOSX”
(the quotes (“) are ⇧+2 incase this comment field transforms them into something else.
)
If you zip a folder? you can add -r … zip -r foo.zip foo … to include subfolders.
In terminal type: man zip
to bring up the zip manual.
@Hipolito
You can try:
zip yourbigfile.zip –out smallzips.zip -s 10m
That is for 10mb files like: smallzips.zip smallzips.z01 smallzips.z02
But you could use another compression to make smaller file instead. Look at tar gzip bzip etc. 1 file is always better that 2.
Sorry… a typo.
-rf (–datafork) should be:
-df (–datafork)
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