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Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
.\" Copyright (c) 2003-2004 Tim Kientzle
.\" All rights reserved.
.\"
.\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
.\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
.\" are met:
.\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
.\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
.\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
.\"
.\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
.\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
.\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
.\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
.\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
.\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
.\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
.\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
.\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
.\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
.\" SUCH DAMAGE.
.\"
.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd October 1, 2003
.Dt LIBARCHIVE 3
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm libarchive
.Nd functions for reading and writing streaming archives
.Sh LIBRARY
.Lb libarchive
.Sh OVERVIEW
The
.Nm
library provides a flexible interface for reading and writing
streaming archive files such as tar and cpio.
The library is inherently stream-oriented; readers serially iterate through
the archive, writers serially add things to the archive.
In particular, note that there is no built-in support for
random access nor for in-place modification.
.Pp
When reading an archive, the library automatically detects the
format and the compression.
The library currently has read support for:
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
old-style tar
.It
most variants of the POSIX
.Dq ustar
format,
.It
the POSIX
.Dq pax interchange
format,
.It
GNU-format tar archives,
.It
POSIX octet-oriented cpio archives.
.El
The library automatically detects archives compressed with
Document support for reading .Z compressed archives. Correct a few other minor nits.
2004-05-27 04:21:52 +00:00
.Xr gzip 1 ,
.Xr bzip2 1 ,
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
or
Document support for reading .Z compressed archives. Correct a few other minor nits.
2004-05-27 04:21:52 +00:00
.Xr compress 1
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
and decompresses them transparently.
.Pp
When writing an archive, you can specify the compression
to be used and the format to use.
The library can write
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
POSIX-standard
.Dq ustar
archives,
.It
POSIX
.Dq pax interchange format
archives,
.It
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
POSIX octet-oriented cpio archives,
.It
two different variants of shar archives.
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
.El
Pax interchange format is an extension of the tar archive format that
eliminates essentially all of the limitations of historic tar formats
in a standard fashion that is supported
by POSIX-compliant
.Xr pax 1
implementations on many systems as well as several newer implementations of
.Xr tar 1 .
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
Note that the default write format will suppress the pax extended
attributes for most entries; explicitly requesting pax format will
enable those attributes for all entries.
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
.Pp
The read and write APIs are accessed through the
.Fn archive_read_XXX
functions and the
.Fn archive_write_XXX
functions, respectively, and either can be used independently
of the other.
.Pp
The rest of this manual page provides an overview of the library
operation.
More detailed information can be found in the individual manual
pages for each API or utility function.
.Sh READING AN ARCHIVE
To read an archive, you must first obtain an initialized
.Tn struct archive
object from
.Fn archive_read_new .
You can then modify this object for the desired operations with the
various
.Fn archive_read_set_XXX
and
.Fn archive_read_support_XXX
functions.
In particular, you will need to invoke appropriate
.Fn archive_read_support_XXX
functions to enable the corresponding compression and format
support.
Note that these latter functions perform two distinct operations:
they cause the corresponding support code to be linked into your
program, and they enable the corresponding auto-detect code.
Unless you have specific constraints, you will generally want
to invoke
.Fn archive_read_support_compression_all
and
.Fn archive_read_support_format_all
to enable auto-detect for all formats and compression types
currently supported by the library.
.Pp
Once you have prepared the
.Tn struct archive
object, you call
.Fn archive_read_open
to actually open the archive and prepare it for reading.
.Pp
Each archive entry consists of a header followed by a certain
amount of data.
You can obtain the next header with
.Fn archive_read_next_header ,
which returns a pointer to an
.Tn struct archive_entry
structure with information about the current archive element.
If the entry is a regular file, then the header will be followed
by the file data.
You can use
.Fn archive_read_data
(which works much like the
.Xr read 2
system call)
to read this data from the archive.
You may prefer to use the higher-level
.Fn archive_read_data_skip ,
which reads and discards the data for this entry,
.Fn archive_read_data_to_buffer ,
which reads the data into an in-memory buffer,
.Fn archive_read_data_to_file ,
which copies the data to the provided file descriptor, or
.Fn archive_read_extract ,
which recreates the specified entry on disk and copies data
from the archive.
In particular, note that
.Fn archive_read_extract
uses the
.Tn struct archive_entry
structure that you provide it, which may differ from the
entry just read from the archive.
In particular, many applications will want to override the
pathname, file permissions, or ownership.
.Pp
Once you have finished reading data from the archive, you
should call
.Fn archive_read_finish
to release all resources.
In particular,
.Fn archive_read_finish
closes the archive and frees any memory that was allocated by the library.
.Pp
The
.Xr archive_read 3
manual page provides more detailed calling information for this API.
.Sh WRITING AN ARCHIVE
You use a similar process to write an archive.
The
.Fn archive_write_new
function creates an archive object useful for writing,
the various
.Fn archive_write_set_XXX
functions are used to set parameters for writing the archive, and
.Fn archive_write_open
completes the setup and opens the archive for writing.
.Pp
Individual archive entries are written in a three-step
process:
You first initialize a
.Tn struct archive_entry
structure with information about the new entry.
At a minimum, you should set the pathname of the
entry and provide a
.Va struct stat
with a valid
.Va st_mode
field, which specifies the type of object and
.Va st_size
field, which specifies the size of the data portion of the object.
The
.Fn archive_write_header
function actually writes the header data to the archive.
You can then use
.Fn archive_write_data
to write the actual data.
.Pp
After all entries have been written, use the
.Fn archive_write_finish
function to release all resources.
.Pp
The
.Xr archive_write 3
manual page provides more detailed calling information for this API.
.Sh DESCRIPTION
Detailed descriptions of each function are provided by the
corresponding manual pages.
.Pp
All of the functions utilize an opaque
.Tn struct archive
datatype that provides access to the archive contents.
.Pp
The
.Tn struct archive_entry
structure contains a complete description of a single archive
entry.
It uses an opaque interface that is fully documented in
.Xr archive_entry 3 .
.Pp
Users familiar with historic formats should be aware that the newer
variants have eliminated most restrictions on the length of textual fields.
Clients should not assume that filenames, link names, user names, or
group names are limited in length.
In particular, pax interchange format can easily accomodate pathnames
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
in arbitrary character sets that exceed
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
.Va PATH_MAX .
.Sh RETURN VALUES
Most functions return zero on success, non-zero on error.
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
The return value indicates the general severity of the error, ranging
from
.Cm ARCHIVE_WARNING ,
which indicates a minor problem that should probably be reported
to the user, to
.Cm ARCHIVE_FATAL ,
which indicates a serious problem that will prevent any further
operations on this archive.
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
On error, the
.Fn archive_errno
function can be used to retrieve a numeric error code (see
.Xr errno 2 ) .
The
.Fn archive_error_string
returns a textual error message suitable for display.
.Pp
.Fn archive_read_new
and
.Fn archive_write_new
return pointers to an allocated and initialized
.Tn struct archive
object.
.Pp
.Fn archive_read_data
and
.Fn archive_write_data
return a count of the number of bytes actually read or written.
A value of zero indicates the end of the data for this entry.
A negative value indicates an error, in which case the
.Fn archive_errno
and
.Fn archive_error_string
functions can be used to obtain more information.
.Sh ENVIRONMENT
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
There are character set conversions within the
.Xr archive_entry
functions that are impacted by the currently-selected locale.
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr tar 1 ,
.Xr archive_entry 3 ,
.Xr archive_read 3 ,
.Xr archive_util 3 ,
.Xr archive_write 3 ,
Fixed cross-references in SEE ALSO. Emininated double space and hard sentence breaks.
2004-07-04 21:15:37 +00:00
.Xr tar 5
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm libarchive
library first appeared in
.Fx 5.3 .
.Sh AUTHORS
.An -nosplit
The
.Nm libarchive
library was written by
.An Tim Kientzle Aq kientzle@acm.org .
.Sh BUGS
Some archive formats support information that is not supported by
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
.Tn struct archive_entry .
Such information cannot be fully archived or restored using this library.
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
This includes, for example, comments, character sets, sparse
file information, or the arbitrary key/value pairs that can appear in
pax interchange format archives.
.Pp
Conversely, of course, not all of the information that can be
stored in an
.Tn struct archive_entry
is supported by all formats.
For example, cpio formats do not support nanosecond timestamps;
old tar formats do not support large device numbers.
.Pp
Many fixes: * Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it. * Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8 for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters. * Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms. * Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of various portability-challenged constructs.) * archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either one, as appropriate. * Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives for star compatibility. * Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar. * Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking with the core library management. * Documentation updates to track the above changes. * Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats. Notes: * The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two would lose a bunch of duplicate code. * The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
2004-03-19 22:37:06 +00:00
The library cannot write pre-POSIX tar archives.
Initial import of libarchive. What it is: A library for reading and writing various streaming archive formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any other place that needs to read or write such archives. Features: * Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format. * Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats. * Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats. * BSD license Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement. Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
2004-02-09 23:22:54 +00:00
The support for GNU tar format is incomplete.
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