Bundled Zip

bundledzip is a simple script to zip many files into many zips of some specified size. Size can be defined by space or count, e.g, 3MB zips or zips with 10 files each.

Installation

1. Install Python - https://www.python.org/downloads/

   This script should work with any Python version 3.6 or higher. For posterity, this script was tested/developed on Python 3.8.6.

2. Install dependencies

We will also need PIP to install dependencies. You can follow tutorials to do so on: MacOS/Linux or Windows. Then run the following within the bundledzip directory:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Help can be found by running

python bundledzip.py --help

For convenience, we paste the output here:

usage: bundledzip.py [-h] -d DIRECTORY -o OUTPUT [-e EXTENSION] -n BUNDLE_NAME -s BUNDLE_SIZE [-u {GB,MB,KB,None}]

Compresses a set of files into a set of bundles of some specified size.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DIRECTORY, --directory DIRECTORY
                        The input directory that contains the files to bundle
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        The directory to write the bundles; created if it does not exist
  -e EXTENSION, --extension EXTENSION
                        The extension of files to zip; unspecified will zip all files
  -n BUNDLE_NAME, --bundle-name BUNDLE_NAME
                        The name to give the bundled files
  -s BUNDLE_SIZE, --bundle-size BUNDLE_SIZE
                        The size of a bundle, whose unit is given by --bundle-unit
  -u {GB,MB,KB,None}, --bundle-unit {GB,MB,KB,None}
                        The unit of the bundle size. "None" will simply treat size as count, which is the default

Example

This project contains an example in example/. In this example, we have a folder called example/unbundled that has a few uncompressed files. Using the below command, a directory is created called example/bundled, which will contain 3 zip files that each contain 2 *.txt documents.

python bundledzip.py -d example/unbundled -o example/bundled -e txt -n lorem -s 2

Another example may be to compress a directory containing 50GBs of files to send to a client, say Jack in the Box. However, there is a 100MB limit imposed on the size of zips sent - say over some FTP. For this scenario, a contrived bundledzip that may solve this problem may be:

python bundledzip.py -d manysmallfiles/ -o fewerlargezips/ -n jackinthebox -s 100 -u MB

This will roughly create 500 zip files under the fewerlargezips directory each of size close to 100MB. These zip files can then be sent to the client by whatever means is most convenient for you.