I am using git bash on Windows - that is git for Windows via the integrated bash. Apparently it uses the MINGW/MSYS underpinning. (Update from @VonC: It now uses msys2 since msysgit is obsolete since Q4 2015.)
So there are already a lot of MSYS tools installed - from awk to zcat. However I miss the man command and zip to compress multiple files into a zip file (unzip exists!).
Where from can I install them? I do not want to install another copy of the MINGW system! Any way just to add some pre-compiled tools to the git bash installation?
This worked! Be sure to copy bzip2.dll and not bzip2.zip like I tried which didn't work. – duyn9uyenMar 18, 2021 at 18:21
Thanks for this quick tip. I recently filled up the system disk trying to install large packages and sysadmin went postal on me. I needed a small backdoor way to get stuff done today, and this was just the ticket. – J BJun 2, 2021 at 14:55
5This worked for me, but didn't find the need for step 3, I used the 7z command instead. Example: 7z a -r zipped_filename.zip * – martti dApr 8, 2019 at 3:34
1Thanks @nokieng. Step 3 was what I was looking for my specific need of installing Sdkman on windows. – DexterJun 9, 2020 at 10:09
great.. this was a simple, easy and effective trick that not only worked just fine but saved a lot of time:) Thank you. I was in the same situation and now good to go with the sdkman installation. – itsraghzAug 26, 2020 at 17:09
1This worked for me saved me having to install zip on gitbash which for some inexplicable reason doesn't have a package manager – SystemsInCodeDec 12, 2020 at 14:36
2016: The zip command can be installed from GoW (Gnu On Windows). man is not provided (too big).
It is to note, however, that if you only want to add the zip command from GoW, still the whole GoW system has to be downloaded and installed. Then you can delete the other commands from the bin directory, however make sure to keep the needed dlls in the directory.
Update 2021: tar/zip are by default installed on Windows 10.
7-zip based solutions are available below.
Not sure about installing GoW - this would replicate most of the already existng comands. So maybe it is better to start again with msys2 itself and then add git, zip and man to it... – halloleoAug 9, 2016 at 3:58
I have a controlled laptop and can't install things into the typical directories. I can put "zip" in my path, but what about the DLLs? – tggagneFeb 1, 2017 at 17:28
1@AsGoodAsItGets I agree. I have edited this (old) answer to say as much. – VonCJul 15, 2021 at 13:43
1For cp commands: prefer the use of the -a option instead of the -r option. "Everyone" uses the -r option while "everyone" wants the -a behavior... – symeSep 5, 2019 at 15:36
I am so glad to share my experience on this issue that I haven't known for two years since the first day I played with Groovy. My method needs to have git for Windows installed in Windows OS.
These steps are for installing 7z command-line utility, which behaves a bit differently from zip:
Download and install 7-Zip from its official website. By default, it is installed under the directory /c/Program Files/7-Zip in Windows 10 as my case.
Run git Bash under Administrator privilege and navigate to the directory /c/Program Files/Git/mingw64/bin, you can run the command ln -s "/c/Program Files/7-Zip/7z.exe" 7z.exe
I am pretty sure it could help you a lot. Trust me!
Nope. This does not produce a valid zip file in Windows. It produces a tar.gz file. – sboisseOct 6, 2022 at 21:05
Since this was a question about git bash, the proper command would be tar.exe -a -c -f output.zip myfile.txt Windows delivers BSD tar which is able to create ZIP files. Git Bash provides GNU tar, which can't do the same. – ChristianNov 15, 2022 at 17:15
You can mimic a small subset of man behavior in the shell by mapping man <command> to <command> --help | less
Unfortunately, on my machine bash aliases won't add flags to positional arguments, it will try to run the flag as a command and fail (alias man="$1 --help" doesn't work).
And a function called man() is not allowed!
Luckily a combination of bash functions and aliases can achieve this mapping. Put the code below in your ~/.bashrc (create one if it is not there). Don't forget to source ~/.bashrc.
It doesn't get you the full man page, but if all you're looking for is basic info on a command and its flags, this might be all you need.
Interesting alternative. +1. Although <command> --help is often a small subset of an actual man <command> content – VonCAug 9, 2017 at 20:55
Creative thinking! :-) My question though was not about the man tool alone. And I guess the zip functionality is harder to emulate with bash functions & aliases. ;-) – halloleoAug 10, 2017 at 3:58
Find out whatever command you are missing Here I need zip and bzip2 for zip command. Because zip command relies on bzip2.dll to run. Otherwise you will get error “error while loading shared libraries: ?: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”.
Unzip the downloaded files Here I am downloading “zip-3.0-bin.zip” for “zip.exe” and “bzip2-1.0.5-bin.zip” for “bzip2.dll” in the bin folder. /bin/.exe
Copy the command exe file into git-bash folder Here I am copying “zip.exe” and “bzip2.dll” to \Git\usr\bin.
Though this question as been answered quite thoroughly in regards to man there is one alternative to zipping that has not been highlighted here yet. @Zartc brought to my attention that there is a zip compression utility built-in: ziptool. In trying to use it however I found out it is no where near a drop-in replacement and you need to specify each individual file and folder. So I dug into the docs and experimented until I had a bash-function that can do all the heavy lifting and can be used very similar to a basic zip -qrf name * compression call:
You can then for example zip the contents of the current directory by calling it like this:
It's a great idea. However, I get "Git/mingw64/bin/ziptool.exe: error while loading shared libraries: ?: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" on my machine – Mikaël MayerJun 1, 2021 at 6:31
Well, the whole reason why I went down the GitBash/MSYS path was to avoid the installer driven approach of Cygwin. - If I could install Cygwin via zip files or similar (staying away from in-installer downloads) this were my first choice! – halloleoMar 2, 2019 at 2:29
Regarding zip, you can use a following perl script to pack files:
If you make it executable, name it zip, and put it in your $PATH, you can run it like this:
zip archive.zipfiles...
however it will not work for directories. There is no need to install anything, as perl and all required modules are already there in the Git for Windows installation.
Regarding man, at least for git there is a documentation invoked like this:
Here is my experience, I cant run and exe or .msi files in my laptop. so downloaded filed from https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki > go to download Now and Downloaded Source Code (Zip) and unzipped this file in a folder and updated path variable with folder name. This worked out for me.
If you want to zip files without needing to install any additional tools on Windows, in a way that works both on git bash and on other *nix systems, you might be able to use perl.
Per Josip Medved's blog, the following script creates an .epub (which is a zip file), and includes a filter for stripping src/ from the files added to the zip:
Interesting to know, but IMHO a how-to about "using language xy to create zip files" is not really an answer to how to install zip and man commands on Windows, particularly when there are quite a few other 'closer' answers... – halloleoJul 12, 2022 at 1:24
|prompt> pacman -Syu man-db
|prompt> git help archive
$ vi ~/bin/zip
#!/bin/bash
/c/Progra~1/7-Zip/7z.exe a "$@"
$ chmod ugo+x ~/bin/zip
+ zip ytt-lambda-website.zip main ytt
7-Zip 18.01 (x64) : Copyright (c) 1999-2018 Igor Pavlov : 2018-01-28
Scanning the drive:
2 files, 29035805 bytes (28 MiB)
Creating archive: ytt-lambda-website.zip
Add new data to archive: 2 files, 29035805 bytes (28 MiB)
zipWithZiptool() {
# Docs: https://libzip.org/documentation/ziptool.html
targetFilePath="$1"
shift
args=() # collect all args in an array so spaces are handled correctly
while IFS=$'\n\r' read -r line; do
if [[ -d "$line" ]]; then
args+=("add_dir" "$line") # Add a single directory by name
else
# add_file <pathInZip> <pathToFile> <startIndex> <length>
args+=("add_file" "$line" "$line" 0 -1)
fi
done <<< "$(find "$@")" # call find with every arg to return a recursive list of files and dirs
ziptool $targetFilePath "${args[@]}" # quotation is important for handling file names with spaces
}
zipWithZiptool "my.zip" *
PATH=$PATH:/c/cygwin/bin
export PATH
`cygpath -w /bin`
#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Compress::Zip qw(:all);
$z = shift;
zip [ @ARGV ] => $z or die "Cannot create zip file: $ZipError\n";
perl -e '
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;
use IO::Compress::Zip qw(:all);
zip [
"src/mimetype",
<"src/META-INF/*.*">,
<"src/OEBPS/*.*">,
<"src/OEBPS/chapters/*.*">
] => "bin/book.epub",
FilterName => sub { s[^src/][] },
Zip64 => 0,
or die "Zip failed: $ZipError\n";
'
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install zip unzip
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