Re: visiting large zip file

[Bijan Soleymani]

"Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com>" <monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu> 
writes:

> >> Obviously this is not the way it should work since the zip file
> >> content doesn't need to be read into the buffer.
> > Actually, the Emacs mode that supports operations on *.zip files
> > _does_ read the whole zip file into a buffer; hence the problem.
> 
> But I think Kin's point still holds: Emacs does not *need* to read
> the file, since it uses external tools to extract/list/...
> Contrary to tar-mode, for example.
> 
> 
>         Stefan
Technically it doesn't. Emacs simply opens the file to determine the
contents by itself. If it didn't do this it would have to deal with
the different switches used by various "unzip" programs out there to
list the contents of an archive (not to mention having to reformat the
output of such a listing). Wouldn't be so hard but might cause
problems if people use nonstandard tools.

Bijan