How do I zip up multiple files on command line?

Use file < redirection

zip files.zip -@ < zip.lst

Or you could skip the list and just glob

zip files.zip *.txt *.jpg

thanks steeldriver

Historical Answer

I'm glad it's OK to answer my own question because I wanted to chronicle my turmoil in hopes that others following behind in my trail of tears could be spared by searching some key words.

Eventually, I discovered the right answer, but it was posted to the wrong question.

A couple points of clarity:

  • The manual isn't referring to a literal list as in a file, but rather literally to listing the files out on the console.
  • It's understandable that someone might be misled into thinking that foo referred to the file list, but it's actually intended to represent the name of the output zip file.
  • The list of files is omitted in the example because it's using the -@ switch, which demonstrates it "takes the list of input files from standard input instead of from the command line"

Understanding this, we are now armed with a variety of ways to accomplish the goal.

Firstly using the file list we created, we can read out the list with cat and redirect the output with a pipe as standard input to zip:

cat zip.lst | zip -@ files.zip

  adding: file1.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file2.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file3.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file.jpg (stored 0%)
  adding: test.jpg (stored 0%)

Seeing that adding: ... for each file is certainly a good sign, but we've had our hopes up before, so let's just confirm:

unzip -l files.zip

Archive:  files.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
        0  2016-05-24 14:54   file1.txt
        0  2016-05-24 14:54   file2.txt
        0  2016-05-24 14:54   file3.txt
        0  2016-05-24 15:00   file.jpg
        0  2016-05-24 14:59   test.jpg
---------                     -------
        0                     5 files

SWEET! But who wants to create a onetime-use list anyway? That's an awful round-about way of solving this particular scenario. It would be better to get a list from ls and pipe that to zip:

ls | zip -@ files.zip

  adding: file1.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file2.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file3.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file.jpg (stored 0%)
  adding: test.jpg (stored 0%)

Fabulous! Now let's create filters with the awesome power of grep to just zip up the jpg's for instance:

ls | grep .jpg | zip -@ images.zip

  adding: file.jpg (stored 0%)
  adding: test.jpg (stored 0%)

Or just files beginning with "file"

ls | grep file. | zip -@ files.zip

  adding: file1.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file2.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file3.txt (stored 0%)
  adding: file.jpg (stored 0%)

the most simple command with max compression level

zip -9 -r filename.zip /path/to/dir singlefile.jpg

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