[thelist] Automate zip?

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Fri May 21 20:17:58 CDT 2004


On Friday, May 21, 2004, at 04:06 AM, thelist-request at lists.evolt.org 
wrote:
> Subject: Re: [thelist] Automate zip?
> Reply-To: "thelist at lists.evolt.org" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
>
>
> Diane Soini wrote:
>> Hi, please forgive me as I'm a total Windows idiot. I know next to 
>> nothing.
>> I'd like to be able to automate the making of Windows .zip files, by 
>> making it easier to zip up a directory and exclude certain files 
>> automatically.
> Anything that can be scripted on unix, can be scripted on Windows 
> (ish).
>
> I'd suggest looking at finding a scripting language that you know and 
> start from there.  In my case, I use PHP for a lot of my server 
> scripts.  This way, I did't have to learn a whole new language.
>
> PHP will let even let you create the ZIP file without the use of an 
> external application if you use the available functions / classes.
>

I want to do this without a server. I have a version running on a 
couple servers already, but nobody but me can use them.

> -- 
> Michael Pemberton
> evolt at mpember.net.au
>
> Perl is probably the way to go. Get ActiveState Perl and install it. 
> There is a book, "Automating Windows with Perl" by Scott McMahan from 
> R&D Books (an imprint of Miller-Freeman), ISBN 0-87930-589-4, that 
> covers almost this exact scenario.
>
> Good luck,
>

I heard of this from someone else, but I want to distribute my script 
to others. I don't want to have to ask them to install anything too 
complicated.

>
> Allen Schaaf
> Sr. Technical Writer
> http://www.doctordoc.info/
>


> I don't know what version of Windows you are running, but there are 
> heap of
> freeware or shareware ZIP tools out there. You just want one that has a
> command line interface (or exposes some kind of public interface(s))
>
> http://www.camunzip.com/default.htm
> appears to be free
>
> caz.exe -aq c:\test.zip c:\test\*.*
>

Hmmm. That sounds promising. I think we all have Windows XP pro, but 
some may still have 2000. I did find some unix shell tools for Windows 
on sourceforge, but I'm not sure what to do with them. As usual with 
sourceforge stuff: no documentation. But they wouldn't work for me 
anyway, because other people have to be able to execute the script. Not 
just me.


> will zip all the files in c:\test\*.* into a zip file called test.zip. 
> Call
> that from inside a batch file. For the XML stuff, MS has the MSXML 
> classes
> for manipulating XML files. You can navigate the heirachy to the node 
> you
> want and edit as required,

Are there any good tutorials for writing batch files? I've not been 
very successful finding any for people like me who know only "cd" and 
"dir". (Sometimes people ask my to do things for which I'm totally 
unqualified to do, but they seem not to ever want me to do things I DO 
know how to do. This is my "Dilbert" life, I guess.)


>
> Cheers
> Ken



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