How to Zip a Folder Using Terminal or Command Line

I have been having fun with the command line the last couple of days.  Being a command line noob, I am starting to see why all my geeky friends love working in it.  I used to play around with BASIC back in the day, and the command line has a certain nostalgia about it in addition to being powerfully efficient in many ways.  On to the fun…

I have a rather large BuddyPress + WordPress Multi-site installation that BackupBuddy has been choking on.  All of my uploads total around 600MB, which is more than my server can zip up in one sitting.

So, I decided to try out the command line’s zip functionality, and it worked swimmingly!  Below are the steps I took to zip up my blogs.dir directory (the folder that has all my uploads in it).

How to Zip a Folder Using Terminal or Command Line

  1. SSH into your website root via Terminal (on Mac) or your command line tool of choice.
  2. Navigate to the parent folder of the folder that you want to zip up using the “cd” command.
  3. Use the following command:   zip -r mynewfilename.zip foldertozip/   or   tar -pvczf BackUpDirectory.tar.gz /path/to/directory  for gzip compression. In my case, I typed zip -r blogs.dir.zip blogs.dir/ 

That’s it!

The Mighty Mo! Design Co.

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