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Is it possible to use GZip to create a .zip file? I've been Googling and can't find anything that leads me to believe this is possible

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and not use zip? – quanta Sep 27 '11 at 13:04
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up vote 6 down vote

You probably want to use zip and not gzip. This should do it:

zip -r newzip.zip /path/to/zip/stuff
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up vote 6 down vote

This is not possible. gzip and (pk)zip use different compression formats, and more significantly, zip also packages multiple files, directories, together in one archive.

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They (currently) use the same compression format (deflate), they just package things differently. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Sep 27 '11 at 16:41
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The original zip format is the same as:

 tar -cZf package.zip files....

(note the capital Z uses the compress lib - using the small 'z' would give a gzipped archive which pk/winzip can't understand).

i.e. no, you can't use gzip to create a pkzip file - but I'd be surprised to find a Unix machine which had gzip but not compress.

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No it isn't. Zip files are more than just a tarball passed through compress. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Sep 27 '11 at 16:42
Similar to != same as. Tar stores unis permissions and such that zip does not. Zip also compresses only 32kb at a time so that you can extract a single file without having to decompress everything that came before it; tar compresses the whole thing at once ( giving better compression ). Most importantly, they are different file formats that are not recognized by the other tool. – psusi Sep 27 '11 at 17:55
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