Zipping a file while working in a different directory

Question

I'm trying to zip a file from the command line while I'm currently working in a different directory than that file is in.

The file is located at /home/one/file.txt

The present working directory is /home/two/

When I use the command zip /home/one/file.zip /home/one/file.txt, the zip file is created in the correct directory (/home/one), but the contents of the zip file are /home/one/file.txt. I want for the zip file to only contain file.txt.

What's the command to do this?

Answer 1

Zip is archiving file structure relative to the current directory. To override it you will need a -j flag. As per man pages:

-j --junk-paths
Store just the name of a saved file (junk the path), and do not store directory names. By default, zip will store the full path (relative to the current directory).

EDIT: That means -j omits directory names so only files will be compressed. So your example (with working directory in /home/two) would look something like this:

zip -j ../one/file.zip ../one/file.txt

Answer 2

The simplest solution is to use this command :

cd /home/one; zip /home/two/file.zip file.txt

You could use pushd instead of cd so you may come back to the same folder with popd. You could also create a script for it.