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Compress Files into 'zip' Archives

Source: R/zip.R
zip.Rd

zip() creates a new zip archive file.

Usage

zip(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("mirror", "cherry-pick")
)

zipr(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("cherry-pick", "mirror")
)

zip_append(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("mirror", "cherry-pick")
)

zipr_append(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("cherry-pick", "mirror")
)

Arguments

zipfile

The zip file to create. If the file exists, zip overwrites it, but zip_append appends to it. If it is a directory an error is thrown.

files

List of file to add to the archive. See details below about absolute and relative path names.

recurse

Whether to add the contents of directories recursively.

compression_level

A number between 1 and 9. 9 compresses best, but it also takes the longest.

include_directories

Whether to explicitly include directories in the archive. Including directories might confuse MS Office when reading docx files, so set this to FALSE for creating them.

root

Change to this working directory before creating the archive.

mode

Selects how files and directories are stored in the archive. It can be "mirror" or "cherry-pick". See "Relative Paths" below for details.

Value

The name of the created zip file, invisibly.

Details

zip_append() appends compressed files to an existing 'zip' file.

Relative paths

zip() and zip_append() can run in two different modes: mirror mode and cherry picking mode. They handle the specified files differently.

Mirror mode

Mirror mode is for creating the zip archive of a directory structure, exactly as it is on the disk. The current working directory will be the root of the archive, and the paths will be fully kept. zip changes the current directory to root before creating the archive.

E.g. consider the following directory structure:

.
|-- foo
|   |-- bar
|   |   |-- file1
|   |   `-- file2
|   `-- bar2
`-- foo2
    `-- file3

Assuming the current working directory is foo, the following zip entries are created by zip:

setwd("foo")
zip::zip("../test.zip", c("bar/file1", "bar2", "../foo2"))
#> Warning in warn_for_dotdot(data$key): Some paths reference parent directory,
#> creating non-portable zip file
zip_list("../test.zip")[, "filename", drop = FALSE]
#>        filename
#> 1     bar/file1
#> 2         bar2/
#> 3      ../foo2/
#> 4 ../foo2/file3

Note that zip refuses to store files with absolute paths, and chops off the leading / character from these file names. This is because only relative paths are allowed in zip files.

Cherry picking mode

In cherry picking mode, the selected files and directories will be at the root of the archive. This mode is handy if you want to select a subset of files and directories, possibly from different paths and put all of the in the archive, at the top level.

Here is an example with the same directory structure as above:

zip::zip(
  "../test2.zip",
  c("bar/file1", "bar2", "../foo2"),
  mode = "cherry-pick"
)
zip_list("../test2.zip")[, "filename", drop = FALSE]
#>     filename
#> 1      file1
#> 2      bar2/
#> 3      foo2/
#> 4 foo2/file3

From zip version 2.3.0, "." has a special meaning in the files argument: it will include the files (and possibly directories) within the current working directory, but not the working directory itself. Note that this only applies to cherry picking mode.

Permissions:

zip() (and zip_append(), etc.) add the permissions of the archived files and directories to the ZIP archive, on Unix systems. Most zip and unzip implementations support these, so they will be recovered after extracting the archive.

Note, however that the owner and group (uid and gid) are currently omitted, even on Unix.

zipr() and zipr_append()

These function exist for historical reasons. They are identical to zip() and zipr_append() with a different default for the mode argument.

Examples

## Some files to zip up. We will run all this in the R session's
## temporary directory, to avoid messing up the user's workspace.
dir.create(tmp <- tempfile())
dir.create(file.path(tmp, "mydir"))
cat("first file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file1"))
cat("second file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file2"))

zipfile <- tempfile(fileext = ".zip")
zip::zip(zipfile, "mydir", root = tmp)

## List contents
zip_list(zipfile)
#>      filename compressed_size uncompressed_size           timestamp permissions
#> 1      mydir/               0                 0 2024-01-27 11:33:18         755
#> 2 mydir/file1              15                10 2024-01-27 11:33:18         644
#> 3 mydir/file2              16                11 2024-01-27 11:33:18         644
#>      crc32 offset
#> 1 00000000      0
#> 2 00effe3a     36
#> 3 735af9a0    108

## Add another file
cat("third file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file3"))
zip_append(zipfile, file.path("mydir", "file3"), root = tmp)
zip_list(zipfile)
#>      filename compressed_size uncompressed_size           timestamp permissions
#> 1      mydir/               0                 0 2024-01-27 11:33:18         644
#> 2 mydir/file1              15                10 2024-01-27 11:33:18         644
#> 3 mydir/file2              16                11 2024-01-27 11:33:18         644
#> 4 mydir/file3              15                10 2024-01-27 11:33:18         600
#>      crc32 offset
#> 1 00000000      0
#> 2 00effe3a     36
#> 3 735af9a0    108
#> 4 b0bf9ffe    181