libzip

libzip — library for manipulating zip archives

libzip (-lzip)

#include <zip.h>

libzip is a library for reading, creating, and modifying zip archives.

The main design criteria for libzip were:

  • Maintain a stable API without breaking backwards compatibility.
  • Do not create corrupt files, even in case of errors.
  • Do not delete data.
  • Be efficient.

For this reason, when modifying zip archives, libzip writes to a temporary file and replaces the original zip archive atomically.

When adding files to an archive, the file data is only read when the new archive is written. Therefore all files added must remain valid until the archive is closed with zip_close(3) or zip_discard(3).

Unless explicitly documented, functions should not be passed NULL pointers as arguments.

These data types correspond to central concepts in libzip. Most of them are private, meaning you can't allocate them or access their members directly. This allows extending the structures in the future without breaking compatibility.

This type represents an opened archive. See zip(5).

This type represents a file from an archive that has been opened for reading. See zip_file(5).

This type represents a source (or destination) of data. It is used in libzip for providing data when adding or replacing files, accessing data from a file inside an archive, and the data for the archive as a whole. See zip_source(5).

This type represents information about an error. Its type can be checked against pre-defined constants and it can be converted to a human readable string. See zip_error(5).

Names of files in the host file system are expected in UTF-8 encoding. On Windows, variants for ASCII and UTF-16 are also available.

Names of files inside archives are by default expected in UTF-8 encoding. Other encodings can be requested by using the flags ZIP_FL_ENC_CP437 and ZIP_FL_ENC_RAW.

For details see the relevant man pages.

The zip format requires the use of forward slash (‘/’) as directory separator. Since backslash (‘\’) can be part of a valid file name on Unix systems, libzip does not automatically convert them, even on Windows. It is the responsibility of the programmer to ensure that all directory separators are passed as forward slashes to libzip.

In general, different zip archives opened by libzip are independent of each other and can be used by parallel-running threads without locking. If you want to use an archive from multiple threads, you have to synchronize access to it yourself. If you use an archive as a source for zip_file_add(3) or zip_file_replace(3), access to the target archive must be synchronized with access to the source archive as well.

Dieter Baron <dillo@nih.at> and Thomas Klausner <wiz@gatalith.at>