How to add files and dirs to a zip file without the root dir ?

Question

The zip utility program, when invoked as zip -r out.zip base/* on this directory structure

.
./base
./base/b
./base/b/c
./base/d

creates the following result

  adding: base/b/ (stored 0%)
  adding: base/b/c (stored 0%)
  adding: base/d (stored 0%)

I would like to obtain a file containing data as from the following output

  adding: b/ (stored 0%)
  adding: b/c (stored 0%)
  adding: d (stored 0%)

I expected the -j option to help me, but it does not: it completely flattens the directory structure. At the moment, the only solution I found is to cd into base and invoke zip from here, but I was wondering if there's a powerswitch I fail to recognize as such in the docs.

Answer 1

I understand that you do not want to cd, but...

If all else fails and you are hoping to keep your call to zip down to one line, you could chain the calls and use a relative path to output zip in the root:

For Windows:

cd base & zip -r ..\out.zip * & cd ..

For Linux/Unix:

cd base ; zip -r ../out.zip * ; cd ..