Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch lkml

[David Brown]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 07:31:52AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 04:41, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> 
> > Thinking about the implications of this I wonder why no one has built
> > a general purpose archiver like with a structure like that.  I should
> > give roughly the same compression ration as tar | gzip while still
> > giving you the random access properties of zip. 
> 
> Because zip doesn't have random access properties.

If you're speaking of the 'zip' format that zip and unzip use, it can be
accessed randomly.  There is a table of contents at the end of the file
that contains the offsets of every file in the zip file.

It doesn't have random access writing/updating, however.

Dave

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