From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-09-07T06:45:28+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby archiver

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 06:26:34AM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 04:25:10 +0900, Martin DeMello
> <martindemello@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Is there any pure-ruby way to pack multiple files into a single file,
> > and unpack them later? Compression is optional.
> 
> As a matter of fact, you can use either Jamis Buck's tar.rb or my
> forthcoming Archive::Tar::Minitar based on work by Mauricio Fernandez
> (aka batsman). 

That code has the nice property of working with IO-like objects and
being able to operate in 'streaming mode' (i.e. no seek/rewind calls),
which means you can compress as you write the tar.

For instance, in rpa-base, the following is done in one step, with no
intermediate files

 data files,    
 lots of them   =====> tar ====> gzip   data.tar.gz
                                                   \_____ tar ==> .rpa file
                                                   /              
 metadata       =====> gzip             metadata.gz 

you add data files to the "inner tar", which outputs to a GZipWriter,
which writes into the outer tar, which is being written to disk.

-- 
Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable)
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com