Goal: You want to use zip with Ubuntu Linux without using the GUI. You want to use the character prompt exclusively.
Background: The zip character-based utility is useful for many reasons. At the command line you can free up space while retaining files for future usage. Try this command to see if zip is installed: man zip
Try this command to see if zip is installed: man zip
Part 1: Installing Zip
If the command cannot be found, use this command:
sudo apt-get install zip
If you do not have access to the Internet, and your network has no Debian package repositories configured, get the file from here: https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/zip
To find the correct installation media (and choose the correct link from the website above), you need to determine the architecture. To do this, use this command: dpkg --print-architecture
Once you get the file over, install it with this command: dpkg -i zip.*.deb
Part 2 How to Use Zip
Now that zip is installed, you can use it with a command like this (assuming you have three regular files named pub.txt, pub1.txt, pub2.txt):
zip target.zip pub.txt pub1.txt pub2.txt
The above command will create a zip file called target.zip. The files will be compressed (that is, the .zip file will be smaller than the sum of the three .txt files' sizes). This can help reduce disk I/O when fetching the file, moving it around, and reduce network congestion with fewer packets over the network when it is in transit.