passthru commands to archive files in a directory

[rr1024]

Hello and thanks for reading my question.

I'm wondering where I find the the passthrou commands to have php zip files in a directory..

Currently I created a script that uses passthru on my linux web server to run a command to dump MySQL db to a file then FTP the file automatically to my home server.
For Example I use this to dump the db

        $CmdLine = "mysqldump -u USERNAME --password=PASSWORD OPTIONS DBNAME | gzip > {$file['File']}";
        passthru( $CmdLine ); #passthru -you have to use full paths on everything NO RETURN VALUE 

Now I'd like to do a similar kind of thing in which I backup a set or or just one directory.

So how do I go about finding a similar thing for zip of a directory?

[dagon]

as you already have used, gzip.