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Hey is there any program to buy or get for Mac to zip stuff?

W

WillMak

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 29, 2005
957
0
Hey guys, I have a classmate who just bought a brandnew macbook with stuffit but can't figure out how to "zip" and compress files. Any advice?
 
OS X has a built-in app that handles a lot of zipping functions. Just right click on any file or folder and choose "Create Archive of..." from the contextual menu. It will generate a .zip file.
 
WildCowboy said:
OS X has a built-in app that handles a lot of zipping functions. Just right click on any file or folder and choose "Create Archive of..." from the contextual menu. It will generate a .zip file.
Click to expand...

Sweet thanks. It created the zip but the size is exactly the same. How does one compress it to a smaller sized zip?
 
Some file types will not compress down, as they are already compressed within. A good example of this would be some image formats, and video formats that are lossy to begin with.

What kind of file are you trying to compress ?
 
840quadra said:
Some file types will not compress down, as they are already compressed within. A good example of this would be some image formats, and video formats that are lossy to begin with.

What kind of file are you trying to compress ?
Click to expand...

LOL you called me on it. I tried to compress an image like you said. Thanks fo all the help!
 
The size of the zip depends on the files being zipped. Something like an MP3 won't compress much, if at all, because it's already compressed.

For a comparison of file archivers, see this link for OS X compatible apps. (Note that the built-in OS X archiver is BOMArchiveHelper.)
 
As a note, at least as far as I know, the built-in OS X ZIP application won't allow advanced options like password protecting or splitting archives. Still, I use it all the time.
 
Command Line

There's always the *nix tools, if you're feeling brave ( bzip2, zip, tar/gzip ) for compression, and split for, well, splitting zip files :). They're all platform independant, too. Winzip will quite merrily handle tar.gz files.

Open up a Terminal, away you go.
 
WillMak said:
Hey guys, I have a classmate who just bought a brandnew macbook with stuffit but can't figure out how to "zip" and compress files. Any advice?
Click to expand...

Yes. In the Finder, go to the "Help" menu, into "Mac Help", then type in "zip".
 
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