dmuth / index-zip-files

A collection of scripts to index the filenames from ZIP files to allow for easy searching

Index ZIP Files

What this does: Imagine you have hundreds of ZIP files and you want to find a specific file in one of them, without unzipping each file. This makes that possible.

What this does not do: This does not index the content of each ZIP file.

Usage

Clone this repo, then run the various scripts like this:

• ./zip-index SOURCE_DIR
• ./zip-list SOURCE_DIR
• ./zip-search SOURCE_DIR string

This is built to be fast, so no filename sorting is done at any point. If you want sorting, pipe into the sort command. :-)

If you would like to be able to run this app from anywhere in your filesystem, you'll want to...

Creating Aliases

Running ./zip-aliases SOURCE_DIR ALIAS_KEY will emit a series of aliases that can be used to index, list, and search ZIP files.

Example:

./zip-aliases ~/Dropbox/ dropbox
# 
# Generating aliases tied to this installation and source directory
# 
# Source Directory: /Users/doug/Dropbox
# Alias Key: dropbox
# 
alias zip-index-dropbox="$HOME/development/index-zip-files/zip-index $HOME/Dropbox"
alias zip-list-dropbox="$HOME/development/index-zip-files/zip-list $HOME/Dropbox"
alias zip-search-dropbox="$HOME/development/index-zip-files/zip-search $HOME/Dropbox"

Once you paste those three alias lines in shell, typing zip-index-dropbox from any directory will index your Dropbox folder's ZIP files, and zip-search-dropbox can be used to search it. And yes, aliases autocomplete in bash. :-)

Terminology

• ZIP File: A compressed archive containing 1 or more files.
• Index directory: A directory under indexed-files/ in the directory you indexed, which containes index files for a specific Source directory.
• Index file: A plaintext file containing filenames of a single ZIP file.

Testing and Development

• Running ./test.sh will run zip-create-test-files to build a sample directory structure containing ZIP files and then

Get in touch

I'm a software engineer based out of Philadelphia, PA. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook and on my blog. Feel free to drop by and say hi!