🚀 go-pugleaf

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

In article <40u1ua$m0l@oddball.sjc.MENTORG.COM>,
Eric Williams @ PCB x5577 <ewill@hpewill.sje.mentorg.com> wrote:

>This would be very difficult without reading and uncompressing
>the entire ZIP file into memory before operating on it.

you could actually do it by skipping around in the ZIP file, although
it would be slow.

>One could also request this for TAR files, ARJ files,
>ZOO files, CPIO files, HEXBIN files, AR files, and basically
>any sort of archiver that currently exists out there.

actually, if you have some sort of drop-in capability in your
filesystem manager, this would be doable.  see below.

>I could see this sort of thing being done by a daemon that
>hooks up to the kernel much like rpc.nfsd does, which would
>make this far more general.  Hopefully such a daemon
>could be hooked up to a dynamically extensible RAM disk
>(something like the Amiga's, only with virtual memory
>capability).

funny you should mention the amiga.  there's a beast for the amiga
called xfh-handler which rides on top of any other file system,
compressing and uncompressing files on the fly.  it can uncompress
from any of the formats for which you have decompression libraries,
and compresses using the format you specify in the mounttable.

i've never tried to mount an xfh filesystem on top of another xfh file
system, but in theory it's possible. :)

i'm not sure how long xfh has been around; it was installed on my
amiga when i bought it in 1993.


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQCVAwUBMD/9HBbgfSHT/piVAQEIkgP/Q+A1w/SiL7rA/LIp7Tk/aE+JrNX00pa0
/I4fC5HwxsmJARabbteWmFCYLc0Je9unbyxco2be1p+vmYat1g60OKYHArsA6Nfc
+h0bP0SgIvnWYhUxxjlPU7C5S7io+ETXRzBbwWjp7E9jYcDiBaWPWEFu8BRJaWPl
nmHUnJZTkkk=
=gDXW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----