Engineer.iX Treeflator

 

 

This program was originally developed to bypass two problems that may occur when you create WinZipped files:

The first problem is a windows problem. When you compress a folder structure with deep trees then everything is fine because WinZip does not know a path limitation. But later when you try to extract the files again it can happend that your WinZip complains because the effective path length [Effective Lenght = Length of Winzips temporary folder + Path length of the archived files] gets too long. (Windows does not allow you to create pathes with more than 256 characters. If you have longer pathes you cannot access the files anymore) So the only way is to tell WinZip that that it has to extract the files into the root directory or into a virtual drive that is mounted on that folder. (e.g. using the SUBST command on Windows Shell)

The second problem is a specific security design problem of WinZip that occures when you want to use WinZip with encryption. Winzip up to version 14 can encrypt files into an archive but it is still unable to encrypt the directory and file names. So a stranger cannot see what's inside a file but you he is able to see the directory and file names and maybe that is enough information for you to be compromised.

To avoid that two problems we have developed a tool that generates a flat directory structure of files and a html file that maps that files via hypertext reference. So all the original file name information is maintained and you can store them in a flat directory structure that can be encrypted with winzip without telling something about the archived content.

The illustration above shows a typical call of the program. Using the parameter -help you can get a list of all available command line options.

The parameters -map2... you can generate Allocation Map Files that allocate the old file names to your new file locations.

The parameter -cdna defines the maximum number of files inside the target folder. This value is by default limited to 10.000 files to avoid that your Windows Explorer gets into trouble viewing the directory index.

 

For future versions we plan additional features and conversion capabilities. If you have a special wish or a fancy idea, do not hesitate and best contact us directly.

 

 

Typical Use Cases

Fall 1 - Flattening Directory Trees

As described above you can use Treeflator for copy files from directory trees into a flat folder structure. This helps you to bypass trouble with the path limitation of the file system.

 

Fall 2 - Generate a list of hash values for all files inside a folder tree

Treeflator also can generate a list of hash values. To reach that you only have to call the program without the command line option -destination=... The result usually looks like that:

 

Last Update on: 30 Jul 2011

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