On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 8:38 AM, MRAB <pyt...@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@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@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 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list