No he didn't, just I've been sort of lurking on this subject ;-)

Actually, tar files are simply a small header, followed by the file's
contents. To add another file, you simply write another header, and contents
(which is why you can cat two tar files together and get a working file).

http://www.goice.co.jp/member/mo/formats/tar.html has a nice brief
description of the header.

As for a C api with a compatible licence, if needs must I'll write one to
your spec (maidast should be back online in a couple of days, so I'll be
back in business development wise).

Peter

--
Peter Mount
Enterprise Support
Maidstone Borough Council
Any views stated are my own, and not those of Maidstone Borough Council


-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Warner [mailto:pjw@rhyme.com.au]
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2000 3:17 PM
To: Peter Mount; pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org;
pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Cc: Pavel@Janik.cz
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] RE: [HACKERS] pg_dump & blobs - editable dump?


At 14:58 12/07/00 +0100, Peter Mount wrote:
>Why not have it using something like tar, and the first file being stored
in
>ascii?
>
>That way, you could extract easily the human readable SQL but still pipe
the
>blobs to stdout.

Has Tom Lane paid you to send this message? :-}

If anyone can send me a nice interface for reading and writing a tar file
from C, I'll do it. I just don't have the inclination to learn about tar
internals at the moment. By 'nice' I mean that I would like:

- to be able to create the archive and write files sequentially using
something similar to fopen/fwrite/fclose.

- open an archive and examine and read files sequentially using a similar
interface to opendir/readdir/fopen/fread/fclose.

- Ideally open a specified file in the archive by name, but if not
possible, then it should be easy using the 'opedir' function above.

This would be a very useful library, I am sure. It also needs to be
licensable under BSD to go into the PG distribution.


----------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Warner                    |     __---_____
Albatross Consulting Pty. Ltd.   |----/       -  \
(A.C.N. 008 659 498)             |          /(@)   ______---_
Tel: (+61) 0500 83 82 81         |                 _________  \
Fax: (+61) 0500 83 82 82         |                 ___________ |
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                                 |    --________--
PGP key available upon request,  |  /
and from pgp5.ai.mit.edu:11371   |/

Wed, 12 Jul 2000 15:25:24 +0100
Peter Mount <petermount@it.maidstone.gov.uk>
RE: RE: [HACKERS] pg_dump & blobs - editable dump?