I have been searching and searching but there does not seem to be a real winzip equivalent out there.

We seem to have gazillions of archiving utilities and some are very advanced but they are still lacking features.

One feature I'm most interested in is password encryption of a archive. I don't care if it's zip rar tar gzip bz2 etc... I just want a linux program that can password encrypt just one of these file types.

zip and rar file formats definetly support it because both winzip and winrar allow you to do this.

As far as linux goes though, I haven't seen this option in ark, file roller, or any of the command line ones.

Karchiver comes close it allows you to change the password of any already encrypted file but unless I'm missing something it doesn't allow me to put a password on a non encrypted file.

I'm in the process of compiling kfilecoder so I will see how that works but based on the website I'm not sure if it does exactly what I'm talking about.

well the zip utility supports a password just fine. just use the -e flag.

Winrar works OK with wine

Thank you, right before I read your responce I found an article mentioning this and I accomplished the task. Thank you so much that is exactly what I wanted.