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I momentarily forgot how to zip a directory when using PuTTy today and, like everyone, I use Google as my ultimate source of research and was surpised to find that the big G came up short – so here is the answer to the question “how do you zip a directory and all of its contents using Telnet or PuTTY SSH clients?”

zip -r ZIPNAME directory

You should be in the directory below that which you wish to compress in order to do it in the above way, and ZIPNAME is the name you wish to give the resulting .zip file.

-r is the zip command which stands for “recurse into directories” – the fact I didn’t know this off the top of my head will show you the flawed nature of my learn by trial and error existence as a webmaster.

Simple!