Re: How to read the contents of a zip file without unzipping it?

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Scott Klement
<midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Actually, I don't think jar or ajar is any simpler than Info-Zip or
7-Zip. In my post, I listed all of these alternatives, and I think
you'll see that none of them is simpler than the other.

Yes, they are all pretty simple, once installed.

The advantage to jar/ajar is that it comes with the Java component of
the operating system (which most shops already have installed.)

Indeed. And some systems are too old to install the others (easily).
I have not been able to get 7-Zip set up on our V5R2 system.

The advantage to the PASE solutions (InfoZip/7-Zip) is that they handle
a wider variety of Zip files, and they run much, much faster.  On my
system, listing a Zip file with jar takes nearly 2 minutes to run.  ajar
took about 30 seconds.  InfoZip and 7-Zip are both sub-second on the
same file.  That's a big difference!

I'm surprised that ajar was so much quicker than jar. I would have
thought ajar was simply a thin wrapper around jar.

Another advantage to the "wider variety of Zip files" is that some of
those other varieties have much, much tighter compression. The LZMA
compression algorithm used by 7-Zip is not as quick as the Deflate
algorithm used by traditional Zip programs, but when your concern is
space rather than speed, LZMA wins hands down, often by a landslide.
(And 7-Zip can still use Deflate for compatibility if needed.)

John