How can I create a zip archive without a file extension using the "zip" command?

Question

Normally, to zip a directory, I can do something like this:

zip -r archive.zip directory/

However, if I try to remove the extension from archive.zip like this:

zip -r archive directory/

It implicitly appends the .zip extension to the output. Is there a way to do this without creating a .zip and then renaming it?

I'm using this version of zip on Ubuntu 18.04:

Copyright (c) 1990-2008 Info-ZIP - Type 'zip "-L"' for software license.
This is Zip 3.0 (July 5th 2008), by Info-ZIP.

@jnovacho I have a Makefile which builds a Python zipapp (zip file with shebang that the Python interpreter knows how to open and run code from). The executable looks cleaner if I omit a file extension extension as would be done with other Unix executables. — Wasabi Fan, Dec 19, 2019 at 19:27

Stephen Kitt · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-18 07:47:38Z

26

The -A (--adjust-sfx) option causes zip to treat the given archive name as-is:

zip -Ar archive directory/

This works even when archive isn’t created as a self-extracting archive.

answered Dec 18, 2019 at 7:47

Stephen Kitt

423k55 gold badges1097 silver badges1194 bronze badges

Add a comment |

Wasabi Fan · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-18 06:36:02Z

16

You can have it provide the zip output to stdout and then redirect it to a file:

zip -r - -- directory/ > archive

The first dash refers to stdout and the pair of dashes separates the initial arguments from the input list, for clarity.

answered Dec 18, 2019 at 6:36

Wasabi Fan

4033 silver badges8 bronze badges

Add a comment |

2 Answers 2