Archiving directories / zip format

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2010 08:17:17 +0100, Zbigniew Szalbot <zszalbot at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> From time to time I want to archive a quite a few directories to download
> them conveniently. I have been using tar to do it, endingin up with a
> tar.gz file. But the problem with it is that I do not have a unix machine
> at home so if I want to extract something or unpack the content, there is
> no easy way to do that. My question basically is if there is a way to end
> up with a zip file? Or are there any windows tools to unzip and/or
> extract content from tar.gz files?

You can use the archivers/zip port, which installs a zip(1) utility with a
command-line syntax vaguely similar to the pkzip/pkunzip tools from old DOS
days.

Then again you can keep using tar.gz or tar.bz2 archivers, like you do now.
WinZip and WinRar tools can deal quite fine with these two compression
formats, Linux machines also have tar/gzip/bzip2 and the rest of the
platforms out there (e.g. MacOS) may have tools similar to WinZip / WinRar.