The Zip archive format allows absolute pathnames (i.e. those starting with 
'/'). Most people don't use them, but it's generally possible to do so 
(possibly inadvertently).

My ArchiveViewer allows extraction of all the files in an archive (which may 
have a mixture of absolute and relative names) into a particular directory. 
The obvious way to handle this is also a potentially dangerous one: use the 
given directory as the root for the relative files, but extract the absolute 
ones to their desired path. i.e., if you have an archive with the files 
(trailing / denotes a directory):

/a/
/a/b
c/d/
c/d/e

and extracted to /tmp, you would get:

/a/
/a/b
/tmp/c/d/
/tmp/c/d/e

Under Unix and some Windows NT systems, file permissions may protect files 
you don't own from being clobbered.

The other obvious way to handle the problem is to make all files relative 
whether or not they started out that way in the archive, so we'd extract the 
above as:

/tmp/a/
/tmp/a/b
/tmp/c/d/
/tmp/c/d/e

If you wanted to extract to the root, of course, that's up to you and your 
filesystem security.

I'm leaning toward the second strategy; does anyone have a preference on this 
that they'd like to share?

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com