zip: Compress Files into 'zip' Archives

In zip: Cross-Platform 'zip' Compression

Compress Files into 'zip' Archives

Description

zip() creates a new zip archive file.

Usage

zip(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("mirror", "cherry-pick"),
  keys = NULL,
  password = NULL,
  encryption = c("aes256", "aes128", "zipcrypto")
)

zipr(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("cherry-pick", "mirror"),
  keys = NULL,
  password = NULL,
  encryption = c("aes256", "aes128", "zipcrypto")
)

zip_append(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("mirror", "cherry-pick"),
  keys = NULL,
  password = NULL,
  encryption = c("aes256", "aes128", "zipcrypto")
)

zipr_append(
  zipfile,
  files,
  recurse = TRUE,
  compression_level = 9,
  include_directories = TRUE,
  root = ".",
  mode = c("cherry-pick", "mirror"),
  keys = NULL,
  password = NULL,
  encryption = c("aes256", "aes128", "zipcrypto")
)

Arguments

zipfile	The zip file to create. If the file exists, zip overwrites it, but zip_append appends to it. If it is a directory an error is thrown.
files	Character vector of paths to files to add to the archive. See details below about absolute and relative path names.
recurse	Whether to add the contents of directories recursively.
compression_level	A number between 1 and 9. 9 compresses best, but it also takes the longest.
include_directories	Whether to explicitly include directories in the archive. Including directories might confuse MS Office when reading docx files, so set this to FALSE for creating them.
root	Change to this working directory before creating the archive.
mode	Selects how files and directories are stored in the archive. It can be "mirror" or "cherry-pick". See "Relative Paths" below for details.
keys	An optional character vector of the same length as files, specifying the paths of the corresponding entries inside the zip archive. For a file, the key is the exact archive path. For a directory, the key becomes the directory prefix under which all contents are stored. If NULL (default), paths are determined by mode. "." may not appear in files when keys is specified.
password	Password for encrypting the archive entries. It can be a string, a raw vector of bytes, or a zero-argument function that returns one of these. If NULL (the default), the zip_password option is consulted; if that is also NULL, entries are stored unencrypted. The password is interpreted as UTF-8 bytes regardless of the current locale, which matches the WinZip/7-Zip convention and ensures interoperability across platforms.
encryption	Encryption scheme to use when password is not NULL. "aes256" (the default) and "aes128" use WinZip AES encryption (AES-256 or AES-128 in CTR mode, key derived via PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1, with an HMAC-SHA1 authentication tag). This scheme is supported by 7-Zip, WinZip, and macOS Archive Utility. "zipcrypto" uses the legacy PKWARE ZipCrypto stream cipher, which is cryptographically weak and should only be used for compatibility with tools that do not support AES encryption.

Details

zip_append() appends compressed files to an existing 'zip' file.

Relative paths

zip() and zip_append() can run in two different modes: mirror mode and cherry picking mode. They handle the specified files differently.

Mirror mode

Mirror mode is for creating the zip archive of a directory structure, exactly as it is on the disk. The current working directory will be the root of the archive, and the paths will be fully kept. zip changes the current directory to root before creating the archive.

E.g. consider the following directory structure:

.
|-- foo
|   |-- bar
|   |   |-- file1
|   |   `-- file2
|   `-- bar2
`-- foo2
    `-- file3

Assuming the current working directory is foo, the following zip entries are created by zip:

setwd("foo")
zip::zip("../test.zip", c("bar/file1", "bar2", "../foo2"))
#> Warning in warn_for_dotdot(data$key): Some paths reference parent directory,
#> creating non-portable zip file
zip_list("../test.zip")[, "filename", drop = FALSE]
#> # A data frame: 4 x 1
#>   filename     
#>   <chr>        
#> 1 bar/file1    
#> 2 bar2/        
#> 3 ../foo2/     
#> 4 ../foo2/file3

Note that zip refuses to store files with absolute paths, and chops off the leading / character from these file names. This is because only relative paths are allowed in zip files.

Cherry picking mode

In cherry picking mode, the selected files and directories will be at the root of the archive. This mode is handy if you want to select a subset of files and directories, possibly from different paths and put all of them in the archive, at the top level.

Here is an example with the same directory structure as above:

zip::zip(
  "../test2.zip",
  c("bar/file1", "bar2", "../foo2"),
  mode = "cherry-pick"
)
zip_list("../test2.zip")[, "filename", drop = FALSE]
#> # A data frame: 4 x 1
#>   filename  
#>   <chr>     
#> 1 file1     
#> 2 bar2/     
#> 3 foo2/     
#> 4 foo2/file3

From zip version 2.3.0, "." has a special meaning in the files argument: it will include the files (and possibly directories) within the current working directory, but not the working directory itself. Note that this only applies to cherry picking mode.

Permissions:

zip() (and zip_append(), etc.) add the permissions of the archived files and directories to the ZIP archive, on Unix systems. Most zip and unzip implementations support these, so they will be recovered after extracting the archive.

Note, however that the owner and group (uid and gid) are currently omitted, even on Unix.

zipr() and zipr_append()

These functions exist for historical reasons. They are identical to zip() and zip_append() with a different default for the mode argument.

Value

The name of the created zip file, invisibly.

Examples

## Some files to zip up. We will run all this in the R session's
## temporary directory, to avoid messing up the user's workspace.
dir.create(tmp <- tempfile())
dir.create(file.path(tmp, "mydir"))
cat("first file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file1"))
cat("second file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file2"))

zipfile <- tempfile(fileext = ".zip")
zip::zip(zipfile, "mydir", root = tmp)

## List contents
zip_list(zipfile)

## Add another file
cat("third file", file = file.path(tmp, "mydir", "file3"))
zip_append(zipfile, file.path("mydir", "file3"), root = tmp)
zip_list(zipfile)

zip documentation built on June 10, 2026, 5:06 p.m.