Introducing Tcl 8.7 Part 11: The ZIP virtual file system

magicsplat.com

19 pointssystems2 comments

This isn't going to help anyone .... But the RISC OS operating system had the facility to go into archives as if they were directories at the operating system level in 1991. ZIP and a few others were supported out-of-the-box.

They weren't just read-only, you could write to files as well. Albeit slowly.

There was no process of "mounting" an archive such as a ZIP to a particular "mount point". You simply treated the ZIP as if it were a directory and accessed files inside it.

If modern operating systems had the same feature, this Tcl feature would be unnecessary.

I'm not sure about writing directly (vs save as), since I only use it for reading, but you can directly open the contents of zip files from Windows explorer or file open/save dialogs. Just provide a full path. For example, c:\archive.zip in the address bar, or c:\archive.zip\file.txt in the filename field.

Having said that, I rarely use it, since I prefer higher compression than zip gives me, and files in uncompressed containers on my drives are usually like that to keep windows defender out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com