Archive::Tar::Minitar README
============================
Archive::Tar::Minitar is a pure-Ruby library and command-line utility that
provides the ability to deal with POSIX tar(1) archive files. The
implementation is based heavily on Mauricio Ferna'ndez's implementation in
rpa-base, but has been reorganised to promote reuse in other projects.
Antoine Toulme forked the original project on rubyforge to place it on github, under
http://www.github.com/atoulme/minitar

This release is version 0.5.2, offering a Ruby 1.9 compatibility bugfix over
version 0.5.1. The library can only handle files and directories at this
point. A future version will be expanded to handle symbolic links and hard
links in a portable manner. The command line utility, minitar, can only create
archives, extract from archives, and list archive contents.

Using this library is easy. The simplest case is:

  require 'zlib'
  require 'archive/tar/minitar'
  include Archive::Tar

    # Packs everything that matches Find.find('tests')
  File.open('test.tar', 'wb') { |tar| Minitar.pack('tests', tar) }
    # Unpacks 'test.tar' to 'x', creating 'x' if necessary.
  Minitar.unpack('test.tar', 'x')

A gzipped tar can be written with:

    tgz = Zlib::GzipWriter.new(File.open('test.tgz', 'wb'))
      # Warning: tgz will be closed!
    Minitar.pack('tests', tgz)

    tgz = Zlib::GzipReader.new(File.open('test.tgz', 'rb'))
      # Warning: tgz will be closed!
    Minitar.unpack(tgz, 'x')

As the case above shows, one need not write to a file. However, it will
sometimes require that one dive a little deeper into the API, as in the case
of StringIO objects. Note that I'm not providing a block with Minitar::Output,
as Minitar::Output#close automatically closes both the Output object and the
wrapped data stream object.

  begin
    sgz = Zlib::GzipWriter.new(StringIO.new(""))
    tar = Output.new(sgz)
    Find.find('tests') do |entry|
      Minitar.pack_file(entry, tar)
    end
  ensure
      # Closes both tar and sgz.
    tar.close
  end

Copyright
=========
# Copyright 2004 Mauricio Julio Ferna'ndez Pradier and Austin Ziegler
#
# This program is based on and incorporates parts of RPA::Package from
# rpa-base (lib/rpa/package.rb and lib/rpa/util.rb) by Mauricio and has been
# adapted to be more generic by Austin.
#
# 'minitar' contains an adaptation of Ruby/ProgressBar by Satoru
# Takabayashi <satoru@namazu.org>, copyright 2001 - 2004.
#
# This program is free software. It may be redistributed and/or modified
# under the terms of the GPL version 2 (or later) or Ruby's licence.
# 
# $Id$