# Virtual access to contents of compressed archive?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/virtual-access-to-contents-of-compressed-archive/197605>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [October 17, 2010, 4:03am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/virtual-access-to-contents-of-compressed-archive/197605 "2010-10-17T04:03:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Dobai-Pataky\_BSSSSl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/77aa72/32.png) [@Dobai-Pataky\_BSSSSl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Dobai-Pataky_BSSSSl)\
**Post date:** [October 17, 2010, 4:03am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/virtual-access-to-contents-of-compressed-archive/197605/1 "2010-10-17T04:03:13Z")

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Would there happen to be some cool module or extension out there that  
could take a compressed archive (tarball, zip, whatever… I’m  
open-minded) and provide a virtual directory and file i/o interface to  
it? That is, allow access and modification of the contents from within  
the program, while not actually extracting the contents to another file?

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**Author:** ![callyworld](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f17d59/32.png) [@callyworld](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/callyworld)\
**Post date:** [October 17, 2010, 9:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/virtual-access-to-contents-of-compressed-archive/197605/2 "2010-10-17T09:40:31Z")

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Am 17.10.2010 04:03, schrieb Terry M.:

> Would there happen to be some cool module or extension out there that  
> could take a compressed archive (tarball, zip, whatever… I’m  
> open-minded) and provide a virtual directory and file i/o interface to  
> it? That is, allow access and modification of the contents from within  
> the program, while not actually extracting the contents to another file?

There’s the rubyzip gem ( [rubyzip | RubyGems.org | your community gem host](http://rubygems.org/gems/rubyzip) ), which  
provides a module Zip::ZipFileSystem which does this I think. As the  
name implies, this is for ZIP files.

Vale,  
Marvin  
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