How to Specify Filenames Within a Zip When Creating It on the Command Line from a Pipe

How do you specify filenames within a zip when creating it on the command line from a pipe?

From what i can gather you cannot do both with the zip command, i mean you cannot both specify the filenames and pipe the content. You can either pipe the contents and the resulting file is - or you can pipe the filenames with -@.

That does not mean that doing so is impossible using other techniques. I outline one of those below. It does mean that you have to have PHP installed and the zip extension loaded.

There could be a whole bunch of other ways to do it. But this is the easiest that I know of. Oh and it's a one-liner too.

This is a working example using PHP

echo contents | php -r '$z = new ZipArchive();$z->open($argv[1],ZipArchive::CREATE);$z->addFromString($argv[2],file_get_contents("php://stdin"));$z->close();' test.zip testfile

To run on windows just swap single and double quotes. Or just place the script in a file.

"test.zip" is the resulting Zip file, "testfile" is the name of the contents that are being piped into the command.

Result from unzip -l test.zip

Archive:  test.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
        6  01-07-2010 12:56   testfile
---------                     -------
        6                     1 file

And here is a working example using python

echo contents | python -c "import sys
import zipfile
z = zipfile.ZipFile(sys.argv[1],'w')
z.writestr(sys.argv[2],sys.stdin.read())
z.close()
" test5.zip testfile2

Result of unzip -l

Archive:  test5.zip
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
        9  01-07-10 13:43   testfile2
 --------                   -------
        9                   1 file

Result of unzip -p

contents

Can I specify redirects and pipes in variables?

I would do something like this (use bash -c or eval):

zipped=''
zipcommand='>'

if [ "$1" = "-z" ]
then
   zipped='zipped '
   filename="${filename}.zip"
   zipcommand='| zip -@'
fi

echo "Creating ${zipped}patch file $filename..."

eval "svn diff $zipcommand $filename"
# this also works: 
# bash -c "svn diff $zipcommand $filename"

This appears to work, but my version of zip (Mac OS X) required that i change the line:

zipcommand='| zip -@'

zipcommand='| zip - - >'

Edit: incorporated @DanielBungert's suggestion to use eval

PowerShell partial zip file name

It sounds like you only expect 1 zip file however I tailored this answer around the possibility of having more than 1

We are going to use Get-ChildItem to get any zip files from y:\ that match 'CallRecordings*.zip'
We then pipe these files one at a time to the ForEach-Object cmdlet where we
- assign the extraction folder
- unzip the file
- and then rename the file.

$i is used to allow us different names for our renamed zip file in case there are more than 1 being processed.

    $i = 0
    Get-ChildItem -Path 'Y:\' -Filter 'CallRecording*.zip' | ForEach-Object -Process {
        $extractFolder = "C:\temp\$($_.BaseName)"
        $_ | Expand-Archive -DestinationPath $extractFolder 
        
        # ($? tells us if the last command completed successfully)
        if ($?) {
            # only rename file if Expand-Archive was successful
            $_ | Rename-Item -NewName ((Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString('yyyyMMdd') + "_$((++$i)).zip")
        }
    }

How to create a zip archive with PowerShell?

If you head on over to CodePlex and grab the PowerShell Community Extensions, you can use their write-zip cmdlet.

Since

CodePlex is in read-only mode in preparation for shutdown

you can go to PowerShell Gallery.

Output Filenames in a Folder to a Text File

In PowerShell:

# Get-ChildItem (gci) is PowerShell's dir equivalent.
# -File limits the output to files.
# .BaseName extracts the file names without extension.
(Get-ChildItem -File).BaseName | Out-File files.txt

^{Note: You can use dir in PowerShell too, where it is simply an alias of Get-ChildItem. However, to avoid confusion with cmd.exe's internal dir command, which has fundamentally different syntax, it's better to use the PowerShell-native alias, gci. To see all aliases defined for Get-ChildItem, run
Get-Alias -Definition Get-ChildItem}

Note that use of PowerShell's > redirection operator - which is effectively an alias of the
Out-File cmdlet - would also result in the undesired inclusion of the output, files.txt, in the enumeration, as in cmd.exe and POSIX-like shells such as bash, because the target file is created first.

By contrast, use of a pipeline with Out-File (or Set-Content, for text input) delays file creation until the cmdlet in this separate pipeline segment is initialized^[1] - and because the file enumeration in the first segment has by definition already completed by that point, due to the Get-ChildItem call being enclosed in (...), the output file is not included in the enumeration.

Also note that property access .BaseName was applied to all files returned by (Get-ChildItem ...), which conveniently resulted in an array of the individual files' property values being returned, thanks to a feature called member-access enumeration.

Character-encoding note:

In Windows PowerShell, Out-File / > creates "Unicode" (UTF-16LE) files, whereas Set-Content uses the system's legacy ANSI code page.
In PowerShell (Core) 7+, BOM-less UTF-8 is the consistent default.

The -Encoding parameter can be used to control the encoding explicitly.

^{[1] In the case of Set-Content, it is actually delayed even further, namely until the first input object is received, but that is an implementation detail that shouldn't be relied on.}

Need to ZIP an entire directory using Node.js

I ended up using archiver lib. Works great.

Example

var file_system = require('fs');
var archiver = require('archiver');

var output = file_system.createWriteStream('target.zip');
var archive = archiver('zip');

output.on('close', function () {
    console.log(archive.pointer() + ' total bytes');
    console.log('archiver has been finalized and the output file descriptor has closed.');
});

archive.on('error', function(err){
    throw err;
});

archive.pipe(output);

// append files from a sub-directory, putting its contents at the root of archive
archive.directory(source_dir, false);

// append files from a sub-directory and naming it `new-subdir` within the archive
archive.directory('subdir/', 'new-subdir');

archive.finalize();