How do I preserve symlinks when unzipping an archive using Python?

Question

Many zip archives (especially those include OS X applications) contain symlinks. When using the zipfile.extractall method, symlinks are turned into regular files. Anyone know how to preserve them as links?

Answer 1

There seems to be no way to do this using the zipfile module. I solved it using the subprocess module:

from subprocess import check_output, CalledProcessError, STDOUT

try:
   check_output(['unzip', '-q', my_zipfile, '-d', destination], stderr=STDOUT)

...

except CalledProcessError as err:
   (use err.cmd, err.returncode and err.output to take action)

Answer 2

Not using the extractall method. You'll need to do it manually, probably ending with something looking something like this (except you're extracting not compressing).