Ned Konz 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?

I personally like the non intrusive expansion so I see which files folders
etc that are involved, and from there move the files manually to where 
they are expected to be.

And to answer the other question you had:
Will not the MacFileDirectory take care of most of those issues 
with file names and path names. At least one would whish it did:-)

Karl