I have been researching the possibility of using the Zip -e command in Linux to encrypt and compress a file with success. I am trying to find out if there is a script or someone can help me create one that i can run to automate password protection and compression of an entire directory. Please someone help me, it would be greatly appreciated and would help me get out of a big protection problem at the workplace. Thanks.

Why do you need a script? You could simply use the -r switch.

as far as i know the limitation on the files is 2gb for ZIP encryption. Is there a way to bypass that limit?
I'm really looking for a way to tar, zip or rar a directory with password protection. I've tried to no avail with the ZIP utility as one employees backups are around 3gb and everyone else's being around 900mb and two others 1.5gb.
I'm looking for a hint that can help me with this issue. I'm very familiar with many parts of linux shell scripting, but perl scripting and others like it i am not. If someone has a solution using one of these languages, i would be more than happy to learn.

Not sure (by any means) but I think that limitation had to do with older MS disk formats having that limit and not ZIP itself.

I'm not sure that such limit exists. In case it does exist, then
you could use another archiver. or you could encrypt archive with GnuPG.

what other compression archiver supports encryption? I've been trying to look up gzip or tar and can't find any info on encrypting.

the zip manual itself suggests using pgp to encrypt a zip archive. You can pipe any archiver through gpg (openpgp).

Unfortunately i am not familiar with gpg, i am going to research further. Here is a copy of my crudely made script. Thank you for your help.

#Script to compress and encrypt Backup Files and FTP it to Buffalo Device
#written by jedilost1
zip -e -r backup.zip /export/PrimeView/Staff/
#perl ftpput.pl -H 10.0.30.3 -u backup -p primev -d /disk1/backup /home/igor/backup/backup.zip
mv backup.zip /export/PrimeView/Staff/Miguel
rm -rf backup.zip

rar and 7zip support encryptions. Both are available for linux. 7zip is opensource, rar is not.

It is never too late to learn. Google for GnuPG tutorial or gpg tutorial. Also there is "The GNU Privacy Handbook"(also available as pdf somewhere) which explains how to use it.

You could do something like

thank you so much for the help..
Is there a windows utility that could help me decrypt and get this information back. Plus, what is the code to untar in linux?
It seems to be working though, you guys are the best.

You could use
Not sure about the Windows side

Looks like there's a windows gpg http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.en.html

Not sure about untaring though

thanks man the command worked
i would get an integrity error though when i used it

these are exact error msgs

bzip2: (stdin): trailing garbage after EOF ignored
gpg: WARNING: message was not integrity protected
tar: Child died with signal 13
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Does anyone know how to integrity protect a gpg encrypted file?
I keep getting this message once i decrypt the archive file

i'm sorry i've found out that this message comes out only when not using a public key for encryption, the -c makes it a conventional encryption and supposedly this is a normal message when using it.

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