6 Responses to “zip and pipe”

• 1
   Mark said on 16 Sep 2008 at 16:37

  Hi

  I just had the same problem. What you need to do is use mkfifo or mknod to create a named pipe whose name is the one you want in your zip archive.

  so
  # create a pipe
  mkfifo file.txt
  # start up zip in the background which reads from the pipe
  zip archive.zip file.txt &
  # run your program
  a_program.exe > file.txt
• 2
   Rick said on 19 Sep 2008 at 12:55

  Thanks very much Mark. I don’t think that I have ever used mkfifo before in 20 years of working with unix. It should be noted that you need to add a “fg” command to the end of your commands or some other method to terminate the background process. We eventually solved the problem a different way but that would have worked.

  The actual problem I posed was how to deal with the file called – once you have managed to create it.
• 3
   Harry said on 19 Feb 2009 at 15:53

  I have the exact problem you mention as an exercise. I’m sending the output from a mysqldump command to zip, but the name inside the archive is a hyphen. Could you please tell me how I can rename it in the same chain?
• 4
   Rick said on 20 Feb 2009 at 08:10

  Hi Harry, the answer to my exercise is set out below but I originally left it out because there is no need to get into that position. unzip -p or funzip will extract the file from a zip whatever it is called and Mark’s solution will create a zip with the proper file name inside. However, if for some reason you do end up with a file called “-” then what you need to do is

  ls -i -

  The ls command will accept the hyphen as a file name and give you the inode number. Then

  find . -inum <number> -exec mv {} <newname> \;
• 5
   Harry said on 20 Feb 2009 at 08:46

  Thanks for the reply. I ended up doing it in two commands as I couldn’t get it to work in just one. Here is the command that was giving me headaches (run from a php file with exec($command):

  $command = “/opt/lampp/bin/mysqldump -h “. DB_HOST . ” -u ” . DB_USER . ” –password=” . DB_PASS . $flag . DB_NAME . ” $tables | zip > $zipFile”;

  I ended up dumping the result in an sql file and archiving it afterwords. I can’t see how I can integrate your solution in my problem. If you have any idea, please let me know. I should mention that I am fresh to the unix environment.
• 6
   Rick said on 20 Feb 2009 at 10:01

  Yes, I agree. Your problem is that running from php you would have difficulty setting up, using and then breaking the background process from Mark’s solution. And, anyway, it is all rather complex and opaque. If you can create and delete a temporary file, that is a much clearer method.

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