>> How about .jar files? Or are things from Java world improperly brewed?

>How many people have a jar program around, as compared to a ZIP program?

Actually, both program use exactly the same format as published for PKZIP,
so you can (in theory) use any ZIP tool to exact jar files and the other
way round.

GZIP btw, has the same compression algorithm as PKZIP and GZIP's algorithms
as extracted in the libz.so or zlib.dll is used by Java's jar tool to do
the (de)compression.  PKZIP additionally defines an archive format to store
more than one file in one ZIP file, adding some additional platform
specific information and comments and so on.

A few months ago I proposed somethings called SCAR (for Squeak Compressed
ARchive) which used a very simple archive format to store multiple
compressed or uncompressed files into one big .sqr file but...  you know,
without any feedback I assume that nobody is interested.  I was even
successful to create a big EXE consisting of a VM and that archive attached
to the file and handed over all code to Andreas.


bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf.