tars and zips

[Bob Purvy]

hi all,

I have a feeling this is something for which the answer is "get a real
computer", but anyway:

    - on our pSOS platform, we don't have any support for tar, zip, or
any other archive format.  I have Python 2.0 more or less working on it,
and I've been trying to use the zipfile.py Lib module.  Can someone give
me the short answer on how to inflate a zip file that's been created
somewhere else?  There doesn't seem to be any trivial way to do it,
unless I'm missing something.

    First of all, I haven't found any references to a Python tar module
anywhere.  Am I correct that that doesn't exist?

Anyway, for zip:  I've gotten as far as importing zipfile, creating the
ZipFile object, and listing its contents.  But do I need to write some
Python code to iterate through the files, doing read for each one and
then writing it?  I haven't found any single 'inflate' method anywhere,
nor the equivalent of 'tar xf'.