creating zipfile with symlinks

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 8:38 AM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> Is it even possible to zip a link?
>
> A quick search came up with this:
>
> Are hard links possible within a zip archive?
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8859616/are-hard-links-possible-within-a-zip-archive

Hard links are different. Symlinks are files containing the target
filename, with a special mode bit set. I'm not sure if it's a standard
feature of all zip archivers, but on my Debian system, I can use "zip
--symlinks" to create such a zip. How that will unzip on a system that
doesn't understand symlinks, I don't know.

rosuav at sikorsky:~/tmp$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 rosuav rosuav 162 Mar  4 08:48 aaa.zip
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rosuav rosuav   4 Mar  4 08:49 qwer -> asdf
rosuav at sikorsky:~/tmp$ unzip -l aaa.zip
Archive:  aaa.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
        4  2016-03-04 08:45   qwer
---------                     -------
        4                     1 file


That's a broken symlink (there is no "asdf" in the directory), and zip
and unzip are both fine with that.

Now, how the Python zipfile module handles this, I don't know. The
ZipInfo shows a file mode of 'lrwxrwxrwx', but when I call extract(),
it comes out as a regular file. You might have to do some work
manually, or else just drop to an external command with --symlinks.

ChrisA