FormatEmpty

Libarchive treats empty files specially.

A Philosophical Quandary

A file with zero bytes presents a problem for libarchive. It so happens that an empty file is valid for several of the formats supported by libarchive. This makes it difficult to accurately determine the "format" of such a file.

Libarchive resolves this dilemma by providing a special dearchiving module called "empty" that recognizes an empty file as a valid archive that contains no entries.

Options

Since the "empty" format handler is the only libarchive module that will recognize an empty file, you have control over how empty files get handled.

• If you want empty files to be treated as invalid, simply leave off the "empty" format handler.
• If you want empty files to be treated as empty archives, enable the "empty" handler (which occurs by default if you call `archive_read_support_format_all()`).

Useful Trivia

• You can tell whether a file is empty by examining the format of the archive after it has been opened.
• The "empty" handler is the only handler that mixes well with the raw handler.