Running zipfile From the Command Line

00:00 Running zipfile From the Command Line. Python’s zipfile also offers a minimal command-line interface that allows you to access the module’s main functionality quickly. For example, you can use the -l or --list option as seen on-screen to list the content of an existing ZIP file.

00:22 This command shows the same output as an equivalent call to .printdir() on the sample.zip archive. Now, let’s say you want to create a new ZIP file containing several input files.

00:36 In this case, you can use the -c or --create option.

00:48 This command creates a new_sample.zip file containing the hello.txt, lorem.md, and realpython.md files.

01:05 What if you need to create a ZIP file to archive an entire directory? You may have your own source_dir/ with the same three files you’ve just seen.

01:14 You can create a ZIP file from that directory using the following command.

01:23 With this command, zipfile places source_dir/ at the root of the resulting source_dir.zip file. As you’ve already seen, you can list the archive content by running zipfile with the -l option.

01:39 Note that when you use zipfile to create an archive from the command line, the library implicitly uses the Deflate compression algorithm when archiving the files.

01:50 You can also extract all of the content of a given ZIP file using the -e or --extract option. After running this command, you’ll have a sample/ folder in your working directory.

02:06 The new folder will contain the current files in the sample.zip archive. The final option that you can use with zipfile from the command line is -t or --test. This option allows you to test if a given file is a valid ZIP file.

02:37 In the next section of the course, you’ll take a look at other parts of the Python standard library that can work with ZIP files.