Advanced (De)Compression Features
- Files within compressed archives can be accessed without manual
unpacking. Popup menu items can be applied, documents can be opened, images be viewed,
etc. Probe takes care of creating the temporary files needed, through the concept of File
Realizations.
Figure 1 : Accessing files within a Zip archive.

- You can even run programs from within a compressed archive! When
double-clicking a program inside a compressed archive, Probe will query whether to create
a temporary realization of the archive contents, and after doing so, the program is
started. Probe takes care of all details such as creating temporary directories, and
cleaning up when done.
Figure 2 : Starting a program from within a compressed archive.

- Sometimes one encounters a compressed archive located within another
compressed archive. People familiar with UNIX know that Tar archives are often compressed
to the Gz format. Or a Zip archive may be located within, say, a Cab archive.
- With Probe, such situations are easily handled. You can browse and
access the contents of nested compressed archives to any depth, as easily as described
above.
- Some compressed archive formats have special features, such as
- creating so called multi-volume archives,
- creating self-extracting archives,
- containing different versions (for example updated versions) of
individual single files.
Probe supports and handles such features, both on the compression
and decompression side.
- For the Cab format, Probe enables creating self-extracting archives,
with GUI front-ends. Such archives may be single or multi-volume archives, and may
optioninally specify an Auto-Executable file, which is launched after successful
decompression. Through this Probe feature, it is trivial to create simple Setup style
applications.
- For the Jar archive format, Probe fully supports the concept of Chapters.
With this concept, one can keep multiple backups of a project within a single archive
file. This enables accessing any individual file, in it's current or some previous
version.
Figure 3 : The Jar Chapters Dialog.
