>Sure if you can find a COM component that's great, but you should rethink shying away from Command line shelling. In many cases it's the simplest and quickest solution to a problem. Especially if you use CreateProcess() to hide windows and potentially capture output.

Exactly what I'm doing - I use the original Pkzip25.exe by Phil Katz, the last freebie DOS version, and it still works on every one of the Windowses that came around. To shell out, I use late Ed Rauh's api_apprun library (actually one single class, can be found in downloads here)...

		lcZipName=THIS.zipname
		listfile=FULLPATH(".\zip.lst")
		STRTOFILE(THIS.FILES, listfile)
		lcbatFile=FULLPATH(FORCEEXT(SYS(2015),"bat"))
		logfile=FORCEEXT(lcbatFile,"log")
		THIS.logfile=logfile
		lcPKZ=FULLPATH("pkzip25.exe")

		TEXT textmerge noshow to lcBat
"<<lcPkz>>" -add=update -dire "<<lcZipName>>"  @"<<listfile>>" >"<<logfile>>"
		ENDTEXT
		lcThere=FULLPATH(".")
		STRTOFILE(lcBat, lcbatFile)
		LOCAL oprocess AS api_apprun OF PROCESS.vcx
		oprocess=NEWOBJECT('api_apprun','process', '', lcbatFile, lcThere, 'HID')
		oprocess.LaunchAppAndWait()
		RELEASE oprocess
		ERASE (lcbatFile)

And it's still blazingly fast. This.files is a list of files to zip, but it can just contain a (full path to a) single file. In some cases I also parse the log file, to check for errors.