BowerStudios.com

Usually I use tar.gz files on linux. I create them with
tar -cvzf filenameToCreate.tar.gz dirToZip1 dirToZip2 fileToZip1...

Switch for excluding subdirectories/files today:
tar -cvzf filenameToCreate.tar.gz dirToZip1 dirToZip2 fileToZip1... -exclude pathToFileX

Switch to exclude version control system data - cvs, subversion etc
tar -cvzf filenameToCreate.tar.gz --exclude-vcs dirToZip1 dirToZip2

unzip with:
tar -xvzf filenameToUnzip

which will unzip the file in the current directory