Do you really need a central directory? The tar and cpio file formats basically ... | Hacker News

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ahefner 28 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Recovering Corrupt Zip Files

Do you really need a central directory? The tar and cpio file formats basically append files serially with a small header preceeding each one, and for most use cases this is sufficient.

toast0 28 days ago [–]

You don't need one, but it's convenient for listing the files in the archive without having to scan through it.

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