Re: [Boost-users] boost::iostreams::gzip_compressor and multiple files

From: Jens Seidel (jensseidel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-08-10 08:22:20

On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 11:38:58AM -0400, François Duranleau wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Robert Caldecott wrote:
> >However, I want to create a single gzip file that contains multiple 
> >compressed
> >files, each with a different filename.  Does anyone know how to achieve 
> >this?
> 
> I guess that when you uncompress the file (e.g. with gunzip), you want to 
> get all those named files in, well, different files? As far as I know, the 
> gzip format doesn't allow that (I could be wrong), hence the gzip'ed tar 

Right, it doesn't allow it and this is fine. Why should gzip allow
archiving multiple files? It is a compressing program, not more.

It's again the usual (and fine) Unix philosophy: one program for a
simple task, combine/pipe multiple such simple programs to get more
complex tasks done. This way you can also compress via gzip other
archive formats, do not increase the code base of gzip and make
compressing alone usable for other programs as well (which do not
require tar).

I would wish such a solution would be used on the proprietary systems
which use ZIP as default archiver as well ...

Jens