Command: Compress Files in A Folder Individually

Hi,

If you want to archive in the same folder, you can use a script like this :

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settFoldertochoose folder

tellapplication "Finder" tosettheseFilesto (document filesoftFolderwhosename extensionisnot "zip") asalias list

repeatwithiintheseFiles

mycompress_file(POSIX pathofi)

endrepeat

oncompress_file(tFile)

set tFile to quoted form of tFile

do shell script "/usr/bin/ditto -c -k -rsrc " & tFile & space & tFile & ".zip"

endcompress_file

To do this properly you have to use ditto (the zip utility does not handle extended attributes or resource forks correctly). from man ditto the correct command is:

ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent src_directory archive.zip

ditto will preferentially lump all files into a single archive, so if you want separate archives you're going to have to loop through the items in the dropped folder. That would look something like this (save it as an application to make the droplet):

on opentheFolders

-- items are passed in as a list, so get the first item

set theFolder to POSIX path of first item of theFolders

tell application "System Events"

set pathList to POSIX path of (every disk item of folder theFolder whose visible is true)

end tell

repeat with thisItem in pathList

do shell script "ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent " & quoted form of thisItem & " " & quoted form of (thisItem & ".zip")

end repeat

end open

Do you really need --sequesterRsrc if you are zipping a single file?

What OS are you on? I tested my code in Lion and it works flawlessly as a droplet (no errors of any sort). How did you copy the text into the script editor? the 'invalid token' bit might be html gremlins getting mixed in during copy/paste.

There's nothing in my script that would break in 10.6.8, so I'm almost positive it's a copy/paste issue. try copying into a plain-text text editor (like TextWrangler) and cleaning out any non-standard characters before putting it in the script editor.

easy enough (added a handler to modify the text path and changed the destination path in the shell script):

on opentheFolders

-- items are passed in as a list, so get the first item

set theFolder to POSIX path of first item of theFolders

tell application "System Events"

set pathList to POSIX path of (every disk item of folder theFolder whose visible is true)

end tell

repeat with thisItem in pathList

set destingationPath to modifyPath(thisItem)

do shell script "ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent " & quoted form of thisItem & " " & quoted form of (destingationPath & ".zip")

end repeat

end open

on modifyPath(oldPath)

set {oldTID, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, "/"}

set pathBits to text items of oldPath

set item -2 of pathBits to item -2 of pathBits & ".1"

set newPath to pathBits as text

set my text item delimiters to oldTID

return newPath

end modifyPath

can you tell me more about what you were doing, or at least what you were doing differently than the times it worked before? different kinds of files, bigger folders, or anything that might point to what's giving the timeout. My guess is it will be ditto timing out from some extra-large file or folder. if that's the case, there are two workarounds.

1. Release all the processes to work independently and concurrently. You wouldn't have to worry about timeouts, (the script would ignore responses from the shell, and just fire everything off and quit), but if you have a lot of files in a folder you might hit a resource limit of some sort - I have no idea how many instances of ditto can be running at the same time. That would look like this (only change is I tacked a string onto the end of the shell command):

do shell script "ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent " & quoted form of thisItem & " " & quoted form of (destingationPath & ".zip") & " &> /dev/null &"

Alternately, you could put the DSS inside a timeout block with with a large value. That would give ditto more time to do its work before timing out. That looks like this:

with timeout of 3600 seconds-- set it arbitrarily for one hour. Won't use all that time, but will have it available.

do shell script "ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent " & quoted form of thisItem & " " & quoted form of (destingationPath & ".zip")

end timeout