container options from linux other than tar that work in Windows

Question

I have Windows 10 pc's that do not have winzip or 7zip, or any kind of compression software installed.

do not ask why

As such the windows10 pc's can only do an unzip. They are unable to work with a .tar file.

I have a data/ folder that is 10+ gigabytes; doing a zip -r in RHEL-8.9 takes too long (and I don't know if it is also trying to compress however many files that will not compress).

What ways are there in Linux to containerize a folder (other than tar) to mimic a .tar with zero compression so transfer of it to USB stick and across a network is a simple one file operation and then also be usable in Windows 10/11 where windows does not have 3rd party compression software installed (figure windows is a clean install from win10.iso and that is it) ?

If zip is the best way then what options in Linux given the above description?

Answer 1

if you run the zip command in a shell on linux with no parameter, you will see the brief help message:

$ zip
Copyright (c) 1990-2008 Info-ZIP - Type 'zip "-L"' for software license.
Zip 3.0 (July 5th 2008). Usage:
zip [-options] [-b path] [-t mmddyyyy] [-n suffixes] [zipfile list] [-xi list]
  The default action is to add or replace zipfile entries from list, which
....
  -e   encrypt                      -n   don't compress these suffixes
  -h2  show more help
$

in your case, you can specify -0 to store data uncompressed and -r to archive all data recursively

For example: if you need to combine a whole bar folder into a single huge zip archive, you can launch this command

zip -0 -r  foo.zip  bar/*

and the resulting foo.zip archive can be easily uncompressed on Windows

Answer 2

You can use the option of zip to store the files, w/o compress (like tar). The command is:

zip -0 -r archive.zip /path/to/file