I would like to add to the command line of both tarfile and zipfile interface some additional options that I believe to be useful.

1. Wildcard filename matching for archiving
2. Recursive archiving (with excludes)
3. Append to archive option
4. Compression Selection
 4.1 For zipfile: zip64, bizp2 & lzma (if available)
 4.2 For tarfile: document that gz, xz & bz2 are there and determined by ext.

The command-line interface of zipfile and tarfile modules was deliberately kept simple. If you need more complex functionality, just write a script. Python is a programming language!

> 1. Wildcard filename matching for archiving

This is a work for a shell. Interpreting wildcards by a program breaks compatibility and makes impossible to handle files containing special characters. For example it breaks:

    python3 -m zipfile -c myzip.zip "The Book [vol. 5].txt".

No way.

> 2. Recursive archiving (with excludes)

Archiving already is recursive. It may be worth to add an option for adding directories not recursively.

> 3. Append to archive option

May be. I don't know what to do with compressed tar archives.

> 4.1 For zipfile: zip64, bizp2 & lzma (if available)

Would be nice. And this option could force compression for tarfile.

As new features they can be added only in 3.7.

I'm going to agree w/ Serhiy and say thanks to Steve for the idea but for maintainability purposes we should keep the CLI of both modules simple and only for critical operations.

messages: + msg302328
versions: - Python 2.7