Updating a file in a zip archive from STDIN

command-line-interfacecompressionpipeshellunix

I want to update/freshen a file in a zip archive with the contents of stdin. So far I haven't been able to find a way to tell the zip command that the contents of stdin correspond to a particular file.

E.g. (the last line is how I'd expect it to work but it doesn't make any changes to the zip file):

~/D/tmp ♪ unzip -l sample.odt # an odt file is actually a zip file
Archive:  sample.odt
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
       39  01-06-10 00:46   mimetype
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/statusbar/
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/floater/
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/popupmenu/
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/progressbar/
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/menubar/
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/toolbar/
        0  01-06-10 00:46   Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/
     3374  01-06-10 00:46   content.xml
    11837  01-06-10 00:46   styles.xml
      957  01-06-10 00:46   meta.xml
     1060  01-06-10 00:46   Thumbnails/thumbnail.png
     8086  01-06-10 00:46   settings.xml
     1889  01-06-10 00:46   META-INF/manifest.xml
 --------                   -------
    27242                   15 files
~/D/tmp ♪ unzip -p sample.odt meta.xml > tmp.xml
~/D/tmp ♪ # modify tmp.xml somehow
~/D/tmp ♪ cat tmp.xml | zip sample.odt -u meta.xml

EDIT (Taken from my comment below):
I can't just load the file directly into the zip file by referencing the new version because the initial extraction is never being redirected to a file in my actual situation. Instead to a database where it undergoes some text processing in a background queue. It is then substituted back into the document on demand.

Best Answer

Is there a reason you can't just do:

unzip -p sample.odt meta.xml
#modify meta.xml
zip sample.odt -u meta.xml
rm meta.xml

Then you don't have to worry about doing wierd gyrations to pipeline everything back in

In response to you comment, the only two suggestions I can think of is

a) Write the file out to a random temp directory /tmp/<random_number>/meta.xml then do a zip sample.odt -u /tmp/<random_number>/meta.xml

b) Ask on Stack overflow if there is a programatic way to manipulate your zip file.

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