On Wednesday 20 November 2002 08:29 am, Andreas.Raab at gmx.de wrote:
> > If however the zip file standard was designed to accomodate
> > such header information, then I'd say why not do it?
>
> Is this stated somewhere?! I can't find anything about it in
> http://www.pkware.com/products/white_papers/white_appnote.html

It's not explicitly stated, but if you look at the structure of the 
zip, you'll see that you can make valid zips with prepended 
information. This is how the "self-extracting zips" work. All it 
takes is to have the member offsets in the Central Directory 
increased by the size of the prepended stuff.

Anyway, Squeak supports this directly (and still makes valid zips); if 
you look at a SAR made by SARBuilder, you'll see a datestamp in plain 
text before the first PK member header signature. And these are valid 
zips.

"Squeak archive written 19 November 2002 5:02:10 pm"!
PK 

In the ArchiveViewer, you can write out a zip with a properly 
prepended chunk of data taken from a file (look at the window menu).

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE