Archive::Tar::Minitar README

Archive::Tar::Minitar is a pure-Ruby library and command-line utility that provides the ability to deal with POSIX tar(1) archive files. The implementation is based heavily on Mauricio Ferna’ndez’s implementation in rpa-base, but has been reorganised to promote reuse in other projects.

This release is version 0.5.2, offering a Ruby 1.9 compatibility bugfix over version 0.5.1. The library can only handle files and directories at this point. A future version will be expanded to handle symbolic links and hard links in a portable manner. The command line utility, minitar, can only create archives, extract from archives, and list archive contents.

Using this library is easy. The simplest case is:

require 'zlib'
require 'archive/tar/minitar'
include Archive::Tar

  # Packs everything that matches Find.find('tests')
File.open('test.tar', 'wb') { |tar| Minitar.pack('tests', tar) }
  # Unpacks 'test.tar' to 'x', creating 'x' if necessary.
Minitar.unpack('test.tar', 'x')

A gzipped tar can be written with:

tgz = Zlib::GzipWriter.new(File.open('test.tgz', 'wb'))
  # Warning: tgz will be closed!
Minitar.pack('tests', tgz)

tgz = Zlib::GzipReader.new(File.open('test.tgz', 'rb'))
  # Warning: tgz will be closed!
Minitar.unpack(tgz, 'x')

As the case above shows, one need not write to a file. However, it will sometimes require that one dive a little deeper into the API, as in the case of StringIO objects. Note that I’m not providing a block with Minitar::Output, as Minitar::Output#close automatically closes both the Output object and the wrapped data stream object.

begin
  sgz = Zlib::GzipWriter.new(StringIO.new(""))
  tar = Output.new(sgz)
  Find.find('tests') do |entry|
    Minitar.pack_file(entry, tar)
  end
ensure
    # Closes both tar and sgz.
  tar.close
end

Copyright

# Copyright 2004 Mauricio Julio Ferna’ndez Pradier and Austin Ziegler # # This program is based on and incorporates parts of RPA::Package from # rpa-base (lib/rpa/package.rb and lib/rpa/util.rb) by Mauricio and has been # adapted to be more generic by Austin. # # ‘minitar’ contains an adaptation of Ruby/ProgressBar by Satoru # Takabayashi <satoru@namazu.org>, copyright 2001 - 2004. # # This program is free software. It may be redistributed and/or modified # under the terms of the GPL version 2 (or later) or Ruby’s licence. # # $Id: README 213 2008-02-26 22:32:11Z austin $