How to compress a file with shutil.make_archive in python?

Question

I want to compress one text file using shutil.make_archive command. I am using the following command:

shutil.make_archive('gzipped'+fname, 'gztar', os.path.join(os.getcwd(), fname))

OSError: [Errno 20] Not a directory: '/home/user/file.txt'

I tried several variants but it keeps trying to compress the whole folders. How to do it correctly?

Answer 1

Actually shutil.make_archive can make one-file archive! Just pass path to target directory as root_dir and target filename as base_dir.

Try this:

import shutil

file_to_zip = 'test.txt'            # file to zip
target_path = 'C:\\test_yard\\'     # dir, where file is

try:
    shutil.make_archive(target_path + 'archive', 'zip', target_path, file_to_zip)
except OSError:
    pass