Directory – Zip All Files and Subfolders Without Parent Directory

Install zip and use

zip -r foo.zip .

You can use the flags -0 (none) to -9 (best) to change compressionrate

Excluding files can be done via the -x flag. From the man-page:

-x files
--exclude files
          Explicitly exclude the specified files, as in:

                 zip -r foo foo -x \*.o

          which  will  include the contents of foo in foo.zip while excluding all the files that end in .o.  The backslash avoids the shell filename substitution, so that the name matching
          is performed by zip at all directory levels.

          Also possible:

                 zip -r foo foo -x@exclude.lst

          which will include the contents of foo in foo.zip while excluding all the files that match the patterns in the file exclude.lst.

          The long option forms of the above are

                 zip -r foo foo --exclude \*.o

          and

                 zip -r foo foo --exclude @exclude.lst

          Multiple patterns can be specified, as in:

                 zip -r foo foo -x \*.o \*.c

          If there is no space between -x and the pattern, just one value is assumed (no list):

                 zip -r foo foo -x\*.o

          See -i for more on include and exclude.

In BASH you can use the trailing slash (I think it should work in any POSIX shell):

rm -R -- */

Note the -- which separates options from arguments and allows one to remove entries starting with a hyphen - otherwise after expansion by the shell the entry name would be interpreted as an option by rm (the same holds for many other command line utilities).

Add the -f option if you don't want to be prompted for confirmation when deleting non-writeable files.

Note that by default, hidden directories (those whose name starts with .) will be left alone.

An important caveat: the expansion of */ will also include symlinks that eventually resolve to files of type directory. And depending on the rm implementation, rm -R -- thelink/ will either just delete the symlink, or (in most of them) delete the content of the linked directory recursively but not that directory itself nor the symlink.

If using zsh, a better approach would be to use a glob qualifier to select files of type directory only:

rm -R -- *(/) # or *(D/) to include hidden ones

or:

rm -R -- *(-/)

to include symlinks to directories (but because, this time, the expansion doesn't have trailing /s, it's the symlink only that is removed with all rm implementations).

With bash, AT&T ksh, yash or zsh you can do:

set -- */
rm -R -- "${@%/}"

to strip the trailing /.