Eric Hodel
1/12/2008 8:40:00 PM
On Jan 11, 2008, at 06:03 AM, Daniel Brumbaugh Keeney wrote:
> Is there cross-platform way of extracting or creating `ar' archives?
ar(5) on my system says this:
> A file created with ar begins with the ``magic'' string "!<arch>
> \n". The rest of the archive is made up of objects, each of which
> is composed of a header for a file, a possible file name, and the
> file contents. The header is portable between machine
> architectures, and, if the file contents are printable, the archive
> is itself printable.
and proceeds to describe the latest version of the format which fits
in about 26 lines. It should be really easy.
It makes a note at the bottom of the magic strings for older versions
of ar, but these are probably ancient.