R: Compress Files into 'zip' Archives

zip {zip} | R Documentation

## Compress Files into 'zip' Archives

### Description

`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.
`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 archice. It can be `"mirror"` or `"cherrypick"`. See "Relative Paths" below for details.

### 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.

(Absolute paths are also kept. Note that this might result non-portable archives: some zip tools do not handle zip archives that contain absolute file names, or file names that start with `../` or `./`. zip warns you if this should happen.)

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

##### 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

#### 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.

### Value

The name of the created zip file, invisibly.

### Examples

    ## Some files to zip up. We will run all this in the R sesion'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)

    ## Add another file
    cat("third file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file3"))
    zip_append(zipfile, file.path("mydir", "file3"), root = tmp)
    zip_list(zipfile)

[Package zip version 2.1.0 Index]