How to compress a directory with the built in .net compression classes?

Question

Using the System.IO.Compression namespaces classes GZIPStream and DeflateStream I successfully can compress and decompress individual files. However, if I pass a directoryname as target for compression I get a security exception. Do I have to (recursively) enumerate all files and subdirectories to be able to compress a directory?

(Probably dotnetzip from codeplex will handle this better, but that is not what I am after now).

Answer 1

When you use GZipStream etc, you are compressing a stream; not a file. GZip has no file header information, so there is no sensible way of packing multiple files. For that you need something like .zip; #ziplib will do the job, but you still (IIRC) need to feed it each file manually.