From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-07-01T05:29:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Zlib

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 01:45:14AM +0900, Andreas Schrafl wrote:
> I want to compress a some files in a directory and move them to one
> file. It is for a database and the compression type is zip. so now what
> I don't know is how to zip more than one file. what is the seperator of
> a file in zip?

Are you sure you mean 'zip' files and not 'gzip' files? They are very
different.

'zip' files are multi-component archives (originating from the DOS world as
'pkzip'). I didn't think that ruby-zlib could create them.

'gzip' compresses a single stream. It is possible to concatenate several
gzip files just by putting them one after the other, but when you decompress
it you'll just back a single stream. It's up to you to put your own
demarcation between files, gzip just sees it all as a stream of bytes.

< as I can input more a stream of a file (string) it is
> easy to zip one file but several? I found a way but that is by bypassing
> the command to the console and execute tar. this is not a nice way and I
> want to avoid it if possible.

'tar', 'cpio' and 'zip' are three separate command-line tools which generate
three different types of multi-file archive. I think that if you already
have several files in a directory, then calling one of these external
programs is the easiest way to create one of these archives.

I notice in RAA a module 'tarsimple' which can generate tar files, but I
think it just calls the external command anyway.

Cheers,

Brian.