| LIBARCHIVE(3) | Library Functions Manual | LIBARCHIVE(3) | 
libarchive —
libarchive library provides a flexible interface for
  reading and writing archives in various formats such as tar and cpio.
  libarchive also supports reading and writing archives
  compressed using various compression filters such as gzip and bzip2. The
  library is inherently stream-oriented; readers serially iterate through the
  archive, writers serially add things to the archive. In particular, note that
  there is currently no built-in support for random access nor for in-place
  modification.
When reading an archive, the library automatically detects the format and the compression. The library currently has read support for:
When writing an archive, you can specify the compression to be used and the format to use. The library can write
The read and write APIs are accessed through the
    archive_read_XXX() functions and the
    archive_write_XXX() functions, respectively, and
    either can be used independently of the other.
The rest of this manual page provides an overview of the library operation. More detailed information can be found in the individual manual pages for each API or utility function.
archive_read_extract();
  using it directly can provide greater control over how entries get written to
  disk. This API also makes it possible to share code between archive-to-archive
  copy and archive-to-disk extraction operations.
All of the functions utilize an opaque struct archive datatype that provides access to the archive contents.
The struct archive_entry structure contains a complete description of a single archive entry. It uses an opaque interface that is fully documented in archive_entry(3).
Users familiar with historic formats should be aware that the newer variants have eliminated most restrictions on the length of textual fields. Clients should not assume that filenames, link names, user names, or group names are limited in length. In particular, pax interchange format can easily accommodate pathnames in arbitrary character sets that exceed PATH_MAX.
ARCHIVE_OK (zero) on success,
  non-zero on error. The return value indicates the general severity of the
  error, ranging from ARCHIVE_WARN, which indicates a
  minor problem that should probably be reported to the user, to
  ARCHIVE_FATAL, which indicates a serious problem that
  will prevent any further operations on this archive. On error, the
  archive_errno() function can be used to retrieve a
  numeric error code (see
  errno(2)). The
  archive_error_string() returns a textual error message
  suitable for display.
archive_read_new() and
    archive_write_new() return pointers to an allocated
    and initialized struct archive object.
archive_read_data() and
    archive_write_data() return a count of the number of
    bytes actually read or written. A value of zero indicates the end of the
    data for this entry. A negative value indicates an error, in which case the
    archive_errno() and
    archive_error_string() functions can be used to
    obtain more information.
libarchive library first appeared in
  FreeBSD 5.3.
libarchive library was originally written by
  Tim Kientzle ⟨kientzle@acm.org⟩.
Conversely, of course, not all of the information that can be stored in an struct archive_entry is supported by all formats. For example, cpio formats do not support nanosecond timestamps; old tar formats do not support large device numbers.
The ISO9660 reader cannot yet read all ISO9660 images; it should learn how to seek.
The AR writer requires the client program to use two passes, unlike all other libarchive writers.
| March 18, 2012 | NetBSD 9.4 |