alt Hacker NewsI wish 7-zip would support .tar.gz the way WinRAR does.
WinRAR allows you to browse a .tar.gz without extracting it, 7-zip extracts the .tar to a temp file. It makes working with large .tar.gz files impossible.
(Yes I know that because of how .tar works WinRAR must decompresses it to build the files list. But it beats having to write a 1TB .tar to disk just to see the file listing.
Replies
hackyhacky • yesterday at 12:58 AM
Gnome's file-roller can do this. Not sure if it can run on Windows though.
blibble • yesterday at 12:31 AM
how is that possible?
tar.gz files don't have a central directory (like zip), and they are compressed as one stream (almost always non-seekable)
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WinRAR also seems to handle opening a file in an external app without manually extracting much better. I can just double-click a file in an archive and open it in an external app, while with 7-zip it seems to immediately delete the temporary file so the external app ends up trying to open a non-existent file. Rather annoying if you're just trying to quickly check something like the readme.txt in an archive.