Johnny Matthews | Create an Encrypted Zip File on MacOS

This guide will quickly walk you through how to create an encrypted zip file on a Mac. Since macOS and Linux systems have a lot in common, this will likely work on any Linux distributions too. This was written on 9th of May 2018.

It’s a pretty simple process, so let’s dive into it:

  1. Move the files you want to compress and encrypt to your Desktop.

  2. Open Terminal by pressing CMD + SPACE and searching for Terminal in the search window that pops up.

  3. Run the following command to zip and encrypt the selected files:

    zip -e ~/Desktop/zip-file.zip ~/Desktop/secret.txt

  4. Enter a password to encrypt your .zip file with.

  5. Enter the password again to make sure it’s correct.

  6. The zip application will compress your file(s) into a .zip and encrypt it at the same time.

It’s a good idea to delete the raw file(s) now so no-one can access them without using the password. To do this enter the following into the terminal: rm -rf secret.txt where secret.txt is the name of your file. If you have more than one, simply add on the names of the file like this: rm -rf secret.txt secret_two.jpg third_file.docx something-else.mp3.

Happy coding.