Managing Zip Archives with rubyzip

Abstract

The rubyzip gem is a library for manipulating Zip archives. The Zip file format is a compressed archive format that is very popular on Windows systems. However, there is support for it on nearly all major operating systems; tools that uncompress Zip files are now distributed with Windows, OS X, and most Linux distributions. Zip files can contain multiple files, like tar archives, and are compressed, so in many ways they are similar to tar.gz files. The Zip format shows up in some surprising places; for example, OpenOffice.org documents consist of a number of XML files and other files stored in a Zip archive. They don’t have .zip extensions, but you can verify this by renaming an OpenOffice document to have the .zip extension and then viewing it with a Zip archiver.