There are several tools for compressing and decompressing files in Linux, you can get a summary of these tools in this link. Zip is one of the utilities used for packaging, compressing (archive) and decompressing files.

Installation

• Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zip unzip

• RedHat or CentOS

sudo yum install unzip

Compress files

Compress files in a directory named tutorial –

$ zip -r tutorial.zip tutorial/
   adding: tutorial/ (stored 0%)
   adding: tutorial/host.conf (deflated 13%)
   adding: tutorial/hostname (stored 0%)
   adding: tutorial/hosts.deny (deflated 44%)
   adding: tutorial/hosts (deflated 35%)
   adding: tutorial/hosts.allow (deflated 42%)
   adding: tutorial/auth_sa.py (deflated 52%)

View contents of zip files, without uncompressing –

$ zip -sf tutorial
 Archive contains:
   tutorial/
   tutorial/host.conf
   tutorial/hostname
   tutorial/hosts.deny
   tutorial/hosts
   tutorial/hosts.allow
   tutorial/auth_sa.py
 Total 7 entries (2487 bytes)

Unzip or decompress

To decompress a zipped file, use the unzip command –

 $ unzip tutorial.zip
Archive:  tutorial.zip
   creating: tutorial/
  inflating: tutorial/host.conf
 extracting: tutorial/hostname
  inflating: tutorial/hosts.deny
  inflating: tutorial/hosts
  inflating: tutorial/hosts.allow
  inflating: tutorial/auth_sa.py

Search and compress

You can also combine find and zip command to search for certain types of files and compress those files in one command –

 $ find . -type f -name '*.conf' -print | zip confi-files -@
  adding: host.conf (deflated 13%)
  adding: colord.conf (deflated 50%)
  adding: ntp.conf (deflated 56%)

$ zip -sf confi-files
Archive contains:
  host.conf
  colord.conf
  ntp.conf
Total 3 entries (1858 bytes)

References -
https://linux.die.net/man/1/zip