smaller zip-like format?

[Arne Koewing]

David Garamond <davegaramond at icqmail.com> writes:

> Does anyone know of an open format for compressed archive like zip,
> but with greater compression ratio for lots of small (1K-4K) files,
> while still maintaining relative ease for extracting member files from
> the archive? I'm looking for something like Microsoft's CHM
> format. Python binding is not a must, I'll probably write the binding
> if it doesn't exist.


I've used archive files as created by the  "ar" program  (gnu ar) to
store bzip2 compressed files.

on unix systems you will have standard-tool to pack/unpack
it's a very simple format, not to hard to implement (i have not
implemented  all the functionality of "ar"...; just
create/read/append)

... or you could put bzip2'ed files into an uncompressed .zip

sometimes tar might be an option, but it's stream-oriented - no
random access...