creating zipfile with symlinks

[Larry Martell]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 4:58 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Thanks. That's what I ended up doing.

Unfortunately very slow - around 8 minutes to zip a 7GB dir using the
command line zip vs. 13 seconds with the python zipfile module.