Thank you Jim and Philip for your replies.

On Mar 20, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Jim Tittsler wrote:

> On Mar 20, 2006, at 10:25, Nobumi Iyanaga wrote:
>> And this created a zip file named "man_viewer.zip"; double- 
>> clicking on it (in another folder), it created "man_viewer.app",  
>> but it had only a generic application icon (the original  
>> "man_viewer.app" is an AppleScript application); double-clicking  
>> on it, it did nothing..., and it is not an application bundle.  I  
>> guess it is this "bundle" format which is the cause of this  
>> problem.  Could you show me how I would be able to zip an  
>> application?
>
> The "bundle" is a directory tree.  Try using the -r switch:
> zip -r man_viewer man_viewer.app
>

Thank you.  I tried it, and it works -- except for AppleScript non- 
bundle application.  I think it is because of the resource fork....

> The pattern match used for -x includes the path, so try:
> zip -r images images -x "*/.*"
> or
> zip -r images images -x \*.DS_Store

I tried these, and they work very well also.

> (Also note that the backslash is one of the ways of escaping the  
> '*' from the shell's expansion.  It is not necessary to escape the  
> '.')

Ah, thank you.  This is the kind of info I need...!

On Mar 21, 2006, at 12:09 AM, Philip Aker wrote:

> On 2006-03-19, at 17:25:53, Nobumi Iyanaga wrote:
>
>> I tried these commands, and they worked just as expected.  So, if  
>> I understand well, this means that the second argument is the  
>> "object" of the command, and the first argument is the name of the  
>> resulting zip file to which the extension (".zip") is added  
>> automatically...??
>
> Yes. Often the unix tool man pages use terms such as "input, "in",  
> or, "src", for "object" as you say above. And for the result, some  
> terms used are "output", "out", and "dst".

Thank you!

>
>
>> One thing I tried and could not get the expected result is to zip  
>> an application. I tried:
>
>> cd ~/Desktop
>> zip man_viewer man_viewer.app
>
>
> Jim Tittsler has answered your questions very well.
>
> Another option might be to use:
>
> /System/Library/CoreServices/BOMArchiveHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/ 
> BOMArchiveHelper ~/Desktop/some.app

This worked well for an AppleScript non-bundle application as well.   
The resource fork in Mac OS X is really tricky...!

>
> From Script Editor, a 'do shell script' is:
>
> set input to POSIX path of ((path to desktop as string) & "some.app")
> do shell script "open -a BOMArchiveHelper " & input

Ah, this is very good to know!

>
> This is the application which the Finder contextual menu item uses  
> but I don't know how to supply it any options so the result file is:
>
> ~/Desktop/some.app.cpgz
>
>
> Showing us that BOMArchiveHelper.app is probably a wrapper around  
> the tool 'cpio' (see man cpio for details). Most likely with some  
> extra code to handle resource forks.  However, do not change the  
> resulting file extension to 'zip'.  You'll get a messy output.

I looked at man cpio, but I could not get it work.  I tried:

cd ~/Desktop
cpio -o -z < man_viewer.app > man_viewer

but I got:

cpio: Invalid file name arguement
cpio: Unable to access ???? <Invalid argument>
cpio: Unable to access J9J <No such file or directory>
cpio: WARNING! These file names were not selected:
????
J9J

Anyway, thank you very much!

Best regards,

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan