From plummer@iarc.fr  Fri Mar 26 11:11:00 1999
From: plummer@iarc.fr (Martyn Plummer)
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 12:11:00 +0100
Subject: Using zip format for help pages, examples, etc.
References: <6rn211jpuy.fsf@verdi.stat.wisc.edu>
Message-ID: <36FB6B44.127364FF@iarc.fr>

This sounds similar to the Virtual File System (VFS) used by
the GNU Midnight Commander (a file manager programme).  VFS
allows you to browse files that are not on your native file
system. Among other things, you can look inside tar and
compressed tar files as if they were unpacked.

ZIP file support isn't very good - it's just a shell script
interface to the zip programme - but I suppose this could be
done internally like the "utar" filesystem.

The VFS code comes with the Midnight Commander, but it is
supposed to compile as a standalone library. If this works,
and is portable (!), it might be cleaner to use libvfs than to
do this inside R. Or maybe not. Anyway here is the URL:

http://www.gnome.org/mc/

Martyn

P.S I once trashed my FAT file system by filling it with many
small files from gnu-win32 ports, so this may be a safety
issue as well as a speed one.
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Using zip format for help pages, examples, etc.
Martyn Plummer