archive-mode (arc-mode.el) is the Emacs builtin mode for viewing and editing the contents of archive files like .arc, .zip, .lzh, .zoo, etc. See [[Manual:arc]] for the basics. Note that .tar files are handled by TarMode, which is slightly different. Note that [[TrampMode]] can also access archives via gvfs where available (but it looks like nesting e.g. zip in zip isn't possible with tramp). New archive types can be added to archive-mode without too much trouble. The builtin modes usually look at the file directly to get the contents, but run an external program to make changes. Have a look at for instance * [[http://user42.tuxfamily.org/arc-lzh-exe/index.html arc-lzh-exe.el]] -- adds support for lzh self-extracting executables (viewing only) But note that in general, arc-mode.el is not supposed to be extensible to support additional types of archives on the user level (s.a. [[https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=79574]]) [new] Note about file extraction to the file system: * archive-mode cannot extract a file in an archive *to the file system* (with the timestamp in the archive), only *to a buffer* for viewing (and when you save the buffer to the file system you obviously do not get the correct timestamp from the archive). [new:halloleo:2013-07-18 02:00 UTC] Question to the topic above: Does anybody know of an arc-mode replacement, which enables extraction to the file system? [new] Note about archive-mode for emacs within the cygwin environment: * Diagnostics: Only an empty directory is shown by emacs within cygwin for a non-empty zip-file. * Cause: The zip file has been stored in a MS-DOS path that was mounted under cygwin in text-mode. The zip-file contains carry return-linefeed sequences that are truncated to linefeed only in the cygwin text file system. This invalidates the offsets in the central directory at the end of the zip-file. Thus the directory entries are not found. * Fix: Mount the file system in binary mode. See manual page for mount under cygwin. ---- CategoryFiles