How do I set permissions (attributes) on a file in a ZIP file using Python's zipfile module?

Tom picture Tom · Jan 12, 2009 · Viewed 24.2k times · Source

When I extract files from a ZIP file created with the Python zipfile module, all the files are not writable, read only etc.

The file is being created and extracted under Linux and Python 2.5.2.

As best I can tell, I need to set the ZipInfo.external_attr property for each file, but this doesn't seem to be documented anywhere I could find, can anyone enlighten me?

Answer

Tom picture Tom · Jan 12, 2009

This seems to work (thanks Evan, putting it here so the line is in context):

buffer = "path/filename.zip"  # zip filename to write (or file-like object)
name = "folder/data.txt"      # name of file inside zip 
bytes = "blah blah blah"      # contents of file inside zip

zip = zipfile.ZipFile(buffer, "w", zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
info = zipfile.ZipInfo(name)
info.external_attr = 0777 << 16L # give full access to included file
zip.writestr(info, bytes)
zip.close()

I'd still like to see something that documents this... An additional resource I found was a note on the Zip file format: http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT