How to password protect zips on Mac 🔑

— 2 minute read

If you're on Windows, you might think, but why? Well, Mac doesn't offer a GUI interface for password protecting zips.

Yes, bizarre, right?

We can right-click a file/folder and compress it into a zip.

But we can, by using our best friend The Terminal password, protect our zip files!

Mac default zip function

Using terminal to password protect zip files on Mac

So let's open our favourite terminal program (mine is iTerm2) and enter the following command.

zip -er ~/Desktop/super_secure.zip ~/Desktop/secure.csv

The parameters are as follows:

  • zip - The actual zip command
  • -er - Encrypt Recursive
  • ~/Desktop/super_secure.zip - Output zip name
  • ~/Desktop/secure.csv - Input file/folder

Once we run this, we get prompted to type a password.

You don't see any input on these password fields!

Press enter, and you need to verify the password.

Secure-zip on Mac

We now created a secure zip.

If we try to open this zip, we see the following prompt.

Zip with password on Mac

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