On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 11:38:58AM -0400, François Duranleau wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Robert Caldecott wrote:
However, I want to create a single gzip file that contains multiple compressed files, each with a different filename. Does anyone know how to achieve this?
I guess that when you uncompress the file (e.g. with gunzip), you want to get all those named files in, well, different files? As far as I know, the gzip format doesn't allow that (I could be wrong), hence the gzip'ed tar
Right, it doesn't allow it and this is fine. Why should gzip allow archiving multiple files? It is a compressing program, not more. It's again the usual (and fine) Unix philosophy: one program for a simple task, combine/pipe multiple such simple programs to get more complex tasks done. This way you can also compress via gzip other archive formats, do not increase the code base of gzip and make compressing alone usable for other programs as well (which do not require tar). I would wish such a solution would be used on the proprietary systems which use ZIP as default archiver as well ... Jens