I have a problem, in that I am trying to generate a zip archive of whole file systems' worth of data (multiple gigabytes, lots of files). If I use zip or tar from the command line, this is fine. But I don't want to pick every file; ideally I want a perl module to do the archiving and compression function, writing out to disk as It goes.

I have tried Archive::Zip, and this worked for a small test set. But when it comes to full production size, the process gobbles up more and more memory, as the module is building the archive in memory, until I get failures to add files - the program exits without leaving behind a valid zip archive. Several hours wasted :(.

As an alternative, I could pipe filenames to a command line utility, but I was hoping to do this all in perl.

I know that Archive::TarGzip is capable of reading individual files from an archive without slurping the entire archive into memory. What I am looking for is the equivalent for writing an archive. If there is no archive module that can work on disk rather than all in memory, I might have a go at writing one.

--
I'm Not Just Another Perl Hacker

In reply to Industrial strength archiving by rinceWind

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