My .02 Shekels -

When you see such files, explain the situation to the user, and let him
specify the effective root (he can specify the real root, if he's sure).

Daniel
PS - The archiver is very nice, I like it !

Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> 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