From: Andreas Schrafl <aschrafl@...>
Date: 2003-07-01T16:16:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Zlib

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 05:29:11 +0900
Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com> wrote:

> 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.

I just got a comment that says it has more than one file in these files
and so I tought of zip but probably tar.gz would be the best format.

> 
> '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.
>

I think I'll use the tarsimple module since this gives me a nice looking
interface.

Thanks
andy
 
> Cheers,
> 
> Brian.
> 
>