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.