Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Ellery Newcomer" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
I suppose the name isn't so important, but I really hate zip files whose
contents aren't contained inside a single directory.
This is a bit of a "vim vs emacs" or "static vs dynamic" sort of issue.
Most of the archive programs I've used, including the one I currently use,
put an "Extract to new directory" option into my file manager's right-click
menu. I *always* use that, and consider it downright silly not to. But every
once in a while I'll get an archive that follows the "nothing but one dir"
convention, so I get a useless extra subfolder that I have to either delete
or allow it to clutter up my filesystem, and that just irritates the hell
out of me.
Personally, I'm convinced that any archive program that doesn't allow you to
automatically create a subfolder by default is a bad archive program. And
I'm convinced that a convention that places restrictions on the top-level of
a zip is, well, rediculous. But obviously there are people that disagree
with me on that. So, I guess it's a "vim vs emacs" kind of thing.
I don't really disagree, but it's not always that simple. Take tar, for
instance, which has been around since forever, and which has a legacy
you can't drop just like that. (I wonder if it's even part of the POSIX
standard?) There are literally thousands of applications that depend on
tar working in exactly the same way as it has always done, on all
systems. And that way is to automatically extract all files into the
current directory unless otherwise specified.
As long as tar is the most common archive format on *NIX (and it is, by
far), one must expect people to be true gentlemen and -women who put
their files in a subdirectory inside the archive -- i.e. make tarballs
and not tarbombs. :)
What I really want is an archive program that automatically makes a
subfolder by default *but* detects if the top level inside the archive
contains nothing more than a single folder and intelligently *not* create a
new folder in that case. But I've yet to see one that does that, and I
haven't had time to make one.
If you do, let me know. I'd like that too. :)
-Lars
