NAME File::Archive - Figure out what is in an archive file SYNOPSIS use File::Archive; $arch = File::Archive->new($filename); $name = $arch->filename; $filelist = $arch->catalog; $contents = $arch->member($file); DESCRIPTION Given an archive file of some kind, these methods will determine what type of archive it is, and tell you what files are contained in that archive. It will also give you the contents of a particular file contained in that archive. This was written for the Scripts section of CPAN, so that users could upload tarballs, rather than just single-file scripts. Files can look like something.tar, something.tar.gz, something.tar.Z, or just something. PREREQUISITES Compress::Zlib Archive::Tar version 0.2 or later BUGS Still not able to do anything with something.Z compressed files. I can't quite figure out the docs on Compress::Zlib Hopefully, someone can point me in the right direction. I don't think that this is a huge deal, since I would expect people to use gzip instead. TO DO Might also want to think about doing .zip files as well. AUTHOR Rich Bowen, And Kurt for the inspiration to get it done. --------------------------------------------------- Revision history for Perl extension File::Archive. 0.1 Thu Sep 2 20:56:11 1999 - original version; created by h2xs 1.19 0.2 Thu Sep 2 21:46:00 1999 - Added new, filename, type 0.3 Thu Sep 2 22:35:00 1999 - Added catalog method. Return contents of the file 0.41 Thu Sep 2 23:01:00 1999 - Started on member method. Added some docs. 0.5 Thu Sep 3 00:04:00 1999 - Got member method almost working. something.Z files don't work yet. But maybe that's OK, since real people use gzip, particularly on single files. 0.53 Thu Dec 9 1999 - Changed it to require at least version 0.20 of Archive::Tar, since an important function call seems to have changed name between 0.07 and 0.20. Unfortunately, it seems that the various members of the CPAN-Testers that tested my code all had 0.07 installed.