Extracting files into separate folders

Question

I have few zip files that has at least 10000 files each. I would like to extract files into separate folders by year and month. How can I do that. I have Windows XP Pro.

Answer 1

Not a huge problem - you will need an automated file management software, and I recommend the free app Filesort here.

Filesort

What you do is this

1. Use Filesort to establish rules based on date of the files to sort them into the desired folders.
2. Set Filesort to start monitoring the folder you intend to dump all the contents of the zip files into.
3. Set Filesort to process the files according to the rules every say 2 minutes.
4. Start extracting all the contents of the zip files into the monitored folder, and Filesort will do the rest.

Let us know if it works aye mate?

Answer 2

While I thought this would be possible with an option,
it appears that the standard ZIP tools do not support this.
There is however one way it could be done with some scripting
(choice of scripting is left for you).

I am assuming (of course) that you do not want to extract all the files first
and then sort them around (though, it sounds like a good idea).
Compare that with this scheme. Unless you get a better answer.

1. List the archive contents with date and time information
   • catch this in a new text file
2. Filter (using things like grep) the file into smaller files that form your desired date based sets
3. Extract the archive using these files individually into specific directories

All these options will be supported by most compression tools.
I prefer 7-zip.