Both Linux and Mac OS X have zip, gzip, and bzip2 command-line tools. What about Windows? If you're trying to do some scripting to automate some archiving or backup, and you want it to be a classic, WinZip-compatible .zip file, how can you do it?

WinZip offers a WinZip Command Line Add-on free of charge--if you already own a copy of WinZip Pro!

You shouldn't have to pay for command-line zip. And you don't have to. Enter Info-ZIP. This workgroup has been maintaining free, portable, high-quality versions of zip and unzip. They have plenty of command-line arguments like you would expect from an open source project.

So, with this project's executables in your system path, you can write up a batch file that is executed as a Windows scheduled task. Maybe something like this:

This will zip the c:data directory. Arguments: -q to do it quietly, -S to include system files, -r to recurse into subdirectories. Finally, use -i to point to a file that indicates the exact files to include, by means of a carriage return delimited list.

You can alternatively use -x to specify only which files should be excluded. Perhaps something like this:

The command-line flags are all optional, of course. This tool is certainly a must-have for the Windows scripter.