Can i store unix permissions in a zip file (built with apache ant)?

Question

I\'m building a linux installer for a Java application, and I end up with an install.jar and a setup.sh that I put in a zip file using ant.

The idea is the user unzi

Answer 1

If you use a tar file instead of a zip file, it should preserve the permissions for you. The files' owners and groups might not match up, but the permission bits will.

Answer 2

I think you can do this with Apache Commons Compress.

First paragraph:

Access to internal and external attributes (which are used to store Unix permission by some zip implementations).

Take a look at the API and look for setUnixMode()

Answer 3

<shellscript shell="sh" dir="abc" failonerror="true">
            zip -ry abc.zip *
</shellscript>

The ant script above invokes a shell script to create the zip archive in which the permissions are very well preserved. It works with Ant 1.7 and above. However I have not tried verified running this ant script on windows. This works very well on mac.

Answer 4

zip/unzip in modern linux distros will preserve file permissions. But you need to make sure that the zip in windows honours this.

Answer 5

To expand on Blaine’s answer, you can use <zipfileset> child elements to specify permissions:

<zip destfile="build/MyApplication.zip" encoding="UTF-8">

    <zipfileset dir="${content-dir}" encoding="UTF-8"
        includes="**/setup.sh" filemode="755"/>

    <zipfileset dir="${content-dir}" encoding="UTF-8"
        excludes="**/setup.sh"/>

</zip>

Answer 6

You cannot store Linux/Unix file permissions in a ZIP file.

Edit (after comments) by using the "external attributes" field inside the ZIP header these attributes can be store inside a ZIP file. GNU's unzip is apparently able to read that additional field and restore file permissions. ^{I'm not sure when this was added to the ZIP format as the early versions - coming from a MS-DOS world - did not have support for this.}

The TAR format - being a "native" Unix/Linux format - has been designed to include file attributes and Ant can create TAR files that will preserve attributes across all Linux/Unix operating systems.

<tar compression="gzip" destfile="my-archive.tgz">
  <tarfileset mode="544" dir="dir_with_shell_scripts">
     <include name="*.sh"/>
  </tarfileset>
</tar>