Zip command without including the compressed dir itself

Question

Suppose the structure:

/foo/bar/
        --file1
        --file2
        --file3
        --folder1
          --file4
        --folder2
          --file5

I want to run the unix zip utility, compressing the bar folder and all of it's files and subfolders, from foo folder, but not have the bar folder inside the zip, using only command line.

If I try to use the -j argument, it doesn't create the bar folder inside the zip as I want, but doesn't create folder1 and folder2. Doing -rj doesn't work.

(I know I can enter inside bar and do zip -r bar.zip . I want to know if it's possible to accomplish what $/foo/bar/ zip -r bar.zip . but doing it from $/foo).

Answer 1

You have to do cd /foo/bar then zip -r bar.zip ., however, you can group them with parentheses to run in a subshell:

# instead of: cd /foo/bar; zip -r bar.zip; cd -

( cd /foo/bar; zip -r bar.zip . )

The enclosed (paren-grouped) commands are run in a subshell and cd within it won't affect the outer shell session.

See sh manual.

Compound Commands
    A compound command is one of the following:

    (list) list is executed in a subshell environment (see COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT below).  
           Variable assignments and builtin commands that affect the shell's environment do not remain in effect after the command completes.  
           The return status is the exit status of list.