How to update one file in a zip archive

Question

Is it possible to replace a file in a zip file without unzipping deleting the old file adding the new file and rezipping it back?

Reason is I have a zip file which is really big there is one xml inside the zip file that I have to update sometimes. Unzipping the zip and rezipping it takes a long time. So I'd like to just be able to replace the one xml inside the zip through a script. I already have that checks for updates on the xml I have.

So is it possible to just replace the one xml without unzipping and rezipping ?

Sorry i would use the zip command to do things like that but problem is the script is actually for an android phone and zip is not a command i can use unfortunately sorry i left that out. I would have used zip definately if i could but i only have unzip for droid and then there is tar in busybox but tar doesn't do what i need

Answer 1

I've found the Linux zip file to be cumbersome for replacing a single file in a zip. The jar utility from the Java Development Kit may be easier. Consider the common task of updating WEB/web.xml in a JAR file (which is just a zip file):

jar -uf path/to/myapp.jar -C path/to/dir WEB-INF/web.xml 

Here, path/to/dir is the path to a directory containing the WEB-INF directory (which in turn contains web.xml).