Great! Thanks Dojibear, I'll try that in a sec. I did think of using smth like Norton Commander or Volkov Commander but decided it wouldn't work when I encountered problems doing it in DOS. One complication I see right now is that the person who put those files on CDs gave the achived folders very long names with spaces, parenthesis, dots etc in them. That may pose problems opening them within Norton Commander. Although I haven't used it since back in 1994 or so, so I might be wrong. Thanks a lot for your help and I sure hope this will work b/c so far nothing else did.... Vladimir.
OK, I just tried it. I seems to work a bit faster than what I did before (with Windows Commader), but still, it first unpacks the files into a temp directory and them packs them to the destination you specify. I'll play with it a bit more but it seems the unpack/pack thing is unavoidable. Maybe when you tried it your text file was not very large so it flew by and you didn't notice it did the unpack/repack routine. When I move a 2 gig file, it becomes noticeable. It seems like it's not possible to just take a file that's in an archived directory and move it to a different archived directory without having to unzip it on the way... To a non techie like me it seems like an inefficient way to do it. thanks for your help though. It does seem a bit faster this way.
You find it amusing? OK, here's my offer, I'll take your posts more seriously if you suggest a way one can move a file from an archived directory to another archived directory without unzipping/rezipping it. Let's see who'll be the amused one in the end.
you can try this, I use Winrar (get it from www.rarsoft.com) open up your first zip file using winrar. open up your second zip file using winrar. now you have your two zip files open, you can drag and drop files from zip file 1 to zip file 2. Those you don't want in zip file 1 you can delete. I think this same procedure should work using winzip as well, but I have not tried it because I don't use winzip. autotrader http://sling.to/autotrader http://browse.to/autotrader
Open the zip file programatically, read the header into memory: consult the in-memory table and seek to the beginning of each file, read the number of bytes corresponding to the file length: copy this to the new location. What you dont want to do is read through the entire zip file each time to get to the next file - slow. Use teh in-memory technique. Zip file formats are available at numerous locations including the original pkware specs.....
So I thought! Now I AM amused. Seems the only thing of are capable of doing is typing (skipping the thinking part, it appears). Welcome back to my ignore list. Cesko et al on it felt lonely without you
Thanks! That's the very first thing I tried. The problem is when you drag and drop or move the files from zip file 1 to zip file 2, the files actually first get unzipped and put into a temp location and then zipped back and moved to zip file 2. That's why it takes forever
This seems like the way to go. Thanks CalTrader. Honestly, it's a bit beyond my techie knowledge, but generally I understand the idea. My wife will fill me in on the execution details, she's much better trained to do such things. Thanks a bunch!