Fred,

The "compressed folder" is a standard zip file. GUI shows it as a folder, but it's a file. Your previous try to create the zip file with STRTOFILE failed because it's equivalent with "a text file is internally equivalent with a zip file", which is not true. A zip file has a specific header, where it contains the info about the contained files.

Even GUI allows you to add the files inside with drag'n'drop and/or copy/paste, this doesn't mean it does a COPY internally. According to MSDN, in the system one can find these three dll's: dunzip32.dll, dzip32.dll and zipfldr.dll. These three are doing the magic. Your copy/paste operation is a call to these dlls.

The only way to duplicate programatically the copy/paste in a compressed folder is to declare the corresponding API functions.

I have to mention I use Windows2003 Server and I can't find those dlls in my system - they were removed and/or replaced. However, the OS still allows me to create Compressed folders, so it means the functionality was moved to some other dlls. They are not documented in MSDN, so I can't help you further, but I strongly believe my presumptions are correct.

Thank you.

>Exactly! The GUI knows how to deal with it, but not the command line or internal COPY commands.