How to create .ZIP files on your Mac

Sometimes, its hard to send/recieve a bunch of files together either because there are too many of them or they are too big to fit in an e-mail attachment. A friend of mine the other day asked me if it was possible to create a zip file in on a Mac. "Of course you can create a zip file on your mac," I said. Then I explained to him how one could create a .zip file.

Well, actually creating zip files is really easy - all you need to do is select a bunch of files, right click and click 'Compress 3 Items'. And although it doesn't mention zip anywhere, the mac is going to create a zip file named 'Archive.zip' for your. On previous versions like Tiger, I think it was called 'Make Archive' or something like that, but I'm sure anyone who knows some rudimentary english can figure it out, as long as they know they should right click after selecting the files. Pretty easy huh?

But, what if you wanted to use a better "command line way" to compress these files into something else like a .gzip file or a tarball file? Well you can do that too:

First open terminal and cd to the required directory (tip: just drag and drop the folder from a finder to the terminal window to put its path after typing in cd), then use tar -cf [destination name].tar [source files]. Works great!