FormatRaw

Libarchive's "raw" reader.

Introduction

Libarchive's automatic decompression and decoding support is sometimes useful by itself.

For this reason, libarchive provides a special dearchiving module called "raw" which returns a single fake entry; the data for that entry is the decoded data stream. This provides a way to use libarchive's automatic decompression and decoding

(Note: There has been some discussion of splitting libarchive into two separate libraries. "Libfilter" would expose just the decompression and decoding support, and "libarchive" would then become a user of "libfilter." Initial work has been done but the project is currently looking for people to help complete it.)

Example Code

XXX TODO Example here XXX

Caveat: Don't mix _raw_ with other handlers

If you are using the raw handler, you should generally not enable any other handler (except possibly for the empty handler).

Many of the formats supported by libarchive were not designed with automatic format detection in mind. Although libarchive generally does a very good job of distinguishing different archive formats, mixing non-archive files can produce surprising results. As a result, the raw handler will often lose the bid because a file happens to have a pattern of bytes similar to that of one of the supported archive formats.

In particular, the raw handler is not enabled by `archive_read_support_format_all`.