On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 16:43, Pavel Machek wrote: > Hi! > > > > > >> FWIW, this is how Windows does it now. As of XP, 'Find files' has an > > > > >> option, enabled by default, to look inside archives. If you tell it to > > > > >> look for a driver in a given directory it will also look inside .cab > > > > >> and .zip files. It's extremely useful, I would imagine someone who uses > > > > >> XP a lot will come to expect this feature. > > > > > > > > > It is trivial to implement this by looking inside the files. I.e., the way > > > > > mc has done this for ages. > > > > > > > > Difference is that you can't do "locate" or "find" or "Search".. You > > > > would have to open the files in an archive-supporting application > > > > such as mc. > > > > > > You really need archive support in find. At the very least you need > > > option "enter archives" vs. "do not enter archives". Entering archives > > > automagically is seriously wrong. > > > > But is it efficient to make every application that reads files have to > > know how to get inside a tar file, just to read its contents? That > > Application does not have to know how to handle tar/zip/etc, but it > has to make distinction between "enter archives" and "do not enter > archives". See uservfs.sf.net.
But how do you cache the information you had to look in the archive for in a way that other apps can use it? How do you synchronize access to the cache and maintain cache coherency in userspace? Lee
