Change working directory

zip

I'm trying to compress a directory at

/home/cyrus/sql

And I wanted to change the working directory when zipping the folder:

/ $ zip -b /home/cyrus sql.zip /home/cyrus/sql

But when I check the zip file:

/ $ unzip -l sql.zip

Archive:  sql.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
        0  2013-05-30 10:59   home/cyrus/sql/
  1776642  2013-05-23 10:22   home/cyrus/sql/wordpress.sql
---------                     -------
  1776642                     2 files

The root folder should have been sql. What have I done wrong?

Best Answer

From man zip:

-b path

 --temp-path path
Use the specified path for the temporary zip archive. For example:
zip -b /tmp stuff *
will put the temporary zip archive in the directory /tmp, copying over stuff.zip to the current directory when done. This option is useful when updating an existing archive and the file system containing this old archive does not have enough space to hold both old and new archives at the same time. It may also be useful when streaming in some cases to avoid the need for data descriptors. Note that using this option may require zip take additional time to copy the archive file when done to the destination file system.

By default zip stores the full path relative to the current directory. If you want your zipfile to have your sql directory as the root, you'll need to run the command from the /home/cyrus directory.

Related Solutions

Zsh Scripting – Zip Folder Without Including Path and Using One Argument

The argument of the function is $1.

You can use history expansion modifiers to extract the directory part and the last component of the path: if the argument is ~/directory2/directory1 then $1:h is ~/directory2 and $1:t is directory1. (Mnemonic: head and tail.)

Use parentheses instead of braces around the function body. This way the function body runs in a subshell (a separate shell process), and variable assignments, directory changes and so on only affect the subshell.

coolerzip () (
    cd $1:h &&
    zip -r $2:h.zip $2:h
)

Other shells don't have history expansion modifiers, so you'd need something different to parse the argument. For the file name, ${1##*/} strips off all leading directory components; however, this doesn't work if there's a trailing slash in the parameter, whereas "$(basename -- "$1")" works in that case. For the leading directories, use $(dirname -- "$1"). Note that in shells other than zsh, you need to put double quotes around variable substitutions.

coolerzip () (
    name="$(basename -- "$1")"
    cd "$(dirname -- "$1")" &&
    zip -r "$name.zip" "$name"
)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Zsh Scripting – Zip Folder Without Including Path and Using One Argument

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