I’m trying to zip two files in another directory without zipping the folder hierarchy as well.

The event is triggered by a button press, which causes Javascript to send information using AJAX to PHP. PHP calls a Perl script (to take advantage of Perl’s XLSX writer module and the fact that PHP kind of sucks, but I digress…), which puts the files a few folders down the hierarchy. The relevant code is shown below.

system("createFiles.pl -ids ${rows} -test ${test} -path ${path}",$retVal);

`zip ${path}/{$test}_both.zip ${path}/${test}.csv ${path}/${test}.xlsx`;
`zip ${path}/{$test}_csv.zip  ${path}/${test}.csv`;

The problem is the zip file has ${path} hierarchy that has to be navigated before the files are shown as seen below:

I tried doing this (cd before each zip command):

system("createFiles.pl -ids ${rows} -test ${test} -path ${path}",$retVal);

`cd ${path}; zip {$test}_both.zip ${test}.csv ${test}.xlsx`;
`cd ${path}; zip {$test}_csv.zip  ${test}.csv`;

But that didn’t seem to work at all (no errors, but no files were generated). I’m guessing the cd method is a total hack, but I’m out of ideas. Any help would be appreciated.