[RESOLVED] PHP 4+ - 5.0.4, Windows XP and Gzip Problem

ppowell

I am simply trying to zip together selected files into a single ZIP
file. Windows XP doesn't have a native process by which you can do
this, so I borrowed gzip, downloaded and installed, and upon using it:


  $msg = exec('gzip -q --suffix .zip '. @join(' ', $fileArray));

All of my files named in $fileArray were horribly mangled!! They all
were converted individually into files with .zip extension that lost
all of their original data structures.

I was told it was "so easy" to use gzip.. so how do I use gzip? No
tutorial exists that I can find that even explains gzip; the docs are
absolutely not helpful and man gzip is not going to happen since I'm in
Windows and not UNIX ("gzip -h" does not help either, I need a clear
example of how to compress files together into a single .zip file, like
what WinZip does).

Help!

Thanx
Phil

dalecosp

IANAE, but I have a few observations:

In Windows, usually it's "command /?" or "command /h" or "command /help", not "command -h", which is a 'Nixism.
gzip is not an archiver, and never has been, [edit]it is a compressor[/edit]. In 'Nix land, the archiver is tar(1).
If you want to do "what zip does", why not just use zip, which is, AFAIK, a combination archiver and compressor?

Probably I'm not helping much, but the reason your files were "mangled" is because you used the wrong tool, albeit, apparently, based on bad advice.

dalecosp

ppowell wrote:
Windows XP doesn't have a native process by which you can do
this,

Also, I'm not sure that's entirely true. At least in the Windows Explorer, it's possible to highlight a number of files, right-click and pick "send to" > "zip file" (or something like that). So, at the very least the GUI has a "native process" ... but I don't know if there's a command interface to that procedure or not, so I don't know if that helps either.

I note I didn't help you at all, before, on usage --- on 'Nix, it's like this. "tar -R .html -cf htmlfiles.tar" will create one archive of all html files in and under the current dir. "gzip htmlfiles.tar" will compress the tar'red archive. "gzip .html", OTOH, will give you $n compressed files named "somename.html.gz". There's also a switch to tar to invoke gzip, but I can't recall it ATM.

If you have Zip installed, I've attached a man page. Yeah, boring, and probably overkill. BION, I'm not too good with plain zip, and it usually takes a few tries to get the right invocation, as I'm much more comfortable with tar and gzip.

ppowell

Thanx.. however, I was so fed up that I did away with gzip altogether and found a PEAR-based utility that works just as well, allowing me to produce a cross-platform zipping class object method:

	 function &zip($zipName, $fileList) {										// STATIC VOID METHOD
	 	/*-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		 	New 10/13/2005: Windows has no stable process as of this date to do command-line
			file archiving ("zip"), thus, a cross-OS methodology to involve Windows command-line
			usage will become, at the very least, problematic, after extensive testing.  However,
			there is an available library included with this application that will perform the
			same file archiving capability as the UNIX "zip" command within ./include/zip.inc.php

		For more information go to
		http://cvs.php.net/pear/Archive_Zip/Zip.php?php=3869971673a722307df9b9613f634232

		UPDATE: Will use this functionality only if you are running Windows and Apache together,
		otherwise, you are free to use a command-line based OS utility provided within the
		inherited getKommandOSArray() method as such are unstable within Windows and Apache
		formats (based upon PHPBuilder, Google, and my PHP-DC Users Group)
	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
	global $section, ${$section . 'LocationPath'};
	$locationPath = ($_REQUEST['album']) ? "${$section . 'LocationPath'}/" . $_REQUEST['album'] : ${$section . 'LocationPath'};
	if ($_ENV['windir'] && stristr(strtolower($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE']), 'apache') !== false) {	// WILL EXCLUSIVELY BE USED BY WINDOWS/APACHE
	 $zip =& new Archive_Zip("$locationPath/$zipName");	// SEE NOTES IN ./include/zip.inc.php on CONSTRUCTOR BUILDING
	 // SEE NOTES IN ./include/zip.inc.php ON USAGE OF create() METHOD
	 $fileListArray = preg_split('/"[\s\t]+"/', $fileList);
	 @array_walk($fileListArray, create_function('&$a', '$a = str_replace(\'"\', \'\', $a);'));
	 if (@!$zip->create($fileListArray, array('remove_all_path' => true))) {
	  $this->isSuccessful = false;
	  $this->setErrorArray(array('action' => "Error attempting to create $section downloadable zip file from album \"$album\": " . nl2br(htmlentities($zip->errorInfo()))));
	 }
	} else {												// DEFAULT ZIPPING UTILITY BY ALL OTHER OS'S OR WINDOWS AND !APACHE
  	 // NEW 4/1/2005 SEE NOTES IN classes.inc.php ON getKommandOSArray() METHOD
	 list($zipKommand, $zipRedirect) = @array_values($this->getKommandOSArray('zip-jF9'));	 
	 $msg = exec("$zipKommand $locationPath/$zipName " . trim($fileList) . " $zipRedirect");
	 if (preg_match('/zip error:/i', $msg)) {
	  $this->isSuccessful = false;
	  $this->setErrorArray(array('action' => "Error attempting to create $section downloadable zip file from album \"$album\": " . nl2br($msg)));
	 }
	}
 }

I could not use any "zip" function, pkzip, zip or any other zip, within my Windows XP box, and WZZIP, the command-line utility add-on to WinZip, cannot work in Apache (Apache will lock up and crash your box if you try!), so I tried the only thing left to me and that was the Archive_Zip class created by the people at www.php.net which I implemented into my application and it works beautifully in Windows XP and Apache, and for Windows/Non-Apache I failsafe to the WZZIP utility which is documented to be required for Windows and non-Apache, and for *Nix, just plain 'ol "zip".

Thanx!
Phil