This is a real quickie but it cost me dearly this weekend.  My task was to call 7-zip from within SSIS and extract the contents.

Here’s the basic example that’s all over the Internet:

7z e archive.zip -oC:\Doc

Where:

7z is the executable

e is the argument to perform an extract

archive.zip is the file to be opened and extracted

-o is to extract the output to and

C:\Doc is the extract directory

I’m not much of a DOS command line type but I do have a fair amount of UNIX, Linux, BSD experience.  I’ve used all the tools in the unix space including but not limited to PERL, grep, awk, sed, vi, …  It turns out this experience may have worked against me.

I have never seen a situation where if an argument has no white space between it and the argument value it breaks the command parser.

Bottom line, with 7-zip –o C:\Doc will generate a command line error while -oC:\Doc (no space between “o” ane “C”) works fine.

When it comes to T-SQL I tend to use lots of white space.  Those habits do not necessarily have a positive carryover to 7-Zip.

Happy SQL-ing!