Re: Loading things directly from targz/zip files?

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

On Mon, Mar 01, 1999 at 08:16:26AM +1300, Sam Vilain was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu> writes:
> 
> >   I've noticed that gmc doesn't support opening files which are inside archives.
> > Given that it currently lets you look inside an archive as if it were a
> > drectory, this would be a nice feature to add; would it be possible to
> > teach gmc that (for example) display lets you pipe data in instead of loading
> > it from disk, or would this be too baroque an addition?
> 
> Hmm.  .tar.gz isn't a very efficient format for doing this sort of
> thing.  You have to decompress the entire tar file to find out it's
> contents.  This is not the sort of behaviour that should be default.
> Not for large files, at least.
> 
> Other file formats common in the DOS/Windows world, such as zip, arj,
> rar etc are searchable without decompression, so these should probably
> be openable like a directory.

  Ick.  I didn't think of that.  OTOH, a lot of the time I get these tiny
tar.gz files with a few pictures in them and want to look at the pictures
without extracting the whole file...

  Daniel

-- 
   It is hard to think of anything less sentient than a pumpkin.

             -- Terry Pratchett, _Witches Abroad_