Call for help: cross platform unzip/untar/uncompress

Hmmm... looks like the following are going to be good resources:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.zip.php (especially the comments) which requires http://zziplib.sourceforge.net/zzip-zip.html

and possibly:
http://www.phpconcept.net/pclzip/index.en.php

Perhaps it’s not completely related to the topic of this thread, but I think zip compression could be very useful to backup the whole site. Making a backup with FTP takes sooo long... And we could integrate the "site backup" function with the "db backup" one, to offer a one-click backup function!

The only issue is timeout. I installed Invision Power File Manager (http://www.invisionfilemanager.com/), which is still free, but I am not able to make a complete zip backup of my site, because it contains a lot of images and the server is slow, so my script goes timeout. One solution could be "chopping" the zip compression in several parts, and using HTTP reload to repeatedly call the script on each part.

You’re exactly right on a one-click backup using zip. We ran into a similar timeout issue on a project that was retrieving 250+ MB of data via an XML feed remotely over the internet. It takes about 10 minutes to complete. I’ll find out what Greg did to make it work, as it was initially timing out.

You’re always going to have problems like this due to the timeout settings of php, apache and the browser. You’ll see a similar problem with large uploads. The only solution is to run the script outside of apache. This can be done either by a cron job or running the script as a cgi and having another script check the status of the cgi script to sse if it’s done.

The best example of how this is done can be seen here http://www.raditha.com/megaupload/ . It’s a file upload script that works great. The cgi portion of the script is in perl though.