Compression with *.zip output

[Ivan Voras]

Polytropon wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:27:20 +0200, Manolis Kiagias <sonic2000gr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wildly off-topic as we are discussing Windows, but all recent versions
>> (XP, Vista, etc) can handle zip files. They call them "compressed
>> folders" (don't confuse with NTFS compression though) and even have a
>> silly wizard-like interface for extracting files from them.  If you
>> don't like it you can always install WinZip to take over this function.
> 
> I've seen "WinZip" and my stomache reported to me. :-) Much
> better is the FAR Manager which handles zip archives (and
> many others) just like directories, like the Midnight Commander
> does.
> 
> It's typical for MICROS~1 to make things more complicated than
> they need to be, and invent new names for already known stuff.
> The next time someone mentions "compressed folders" I will know
> what he's talking about, and show him some (real) folders I have
> compressed to 10cm x 10cm x 10cm handy sized cubes. :-)

More off-topicness: The "compressed folders" thingy is called like that
because it's implemented as a very stupid rudimentary kind of a userland
file system. Some tools - mostly Microsoft ones - really treat them like
folders ... almost. The "almost" qualifier is because while they really
sometimes appear like folders, they are not "normal" folders in that you
cannot do almost any operations on the files in there except copy-to and
copy-from, and that includes file content / icons preview. The most
stupid part is that the support is built-in in the shell, not OS-wide,
so applications that do (to translate to POSIX) readdir() instead of
calling the shell to do it for them, treat them as files.

Mostly this behaviour is annoying, if only because the built-in search
tool (which works like "find") does know about the special folders and,
if you're searching something from the shell in a folder that has actual
ZIP files, it will search *within* those zip files, which is extremely slow.

A good, free (as in speech) Windows archiving utility for multiple
archive formats (including zip, gzip and bzip2) is 7-zip:
http://www.7-zip.org/ , which also has a POSIX variant that supports its
own file format: http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/ .


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