Archives

DiskGOup can browse an archive without extracting it. Nothing is written to disk and nothing is executed.

Finding archives

diskgoup archives list ~/Downloads

╭────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────╮
│ Name                       │ Path                                     │    Size │
├────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────┤
│ backups-2024.zip           │ /Users/you/Downloads/backups-2024.zip    │ 1.2 GB  │
╰────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────╯

The listing comes from the scan index, so it is instant. Only .zip files are listed.

Listing the contents

diskgoup archives show ~/Downloads/backups-2024.zip

backups-2024.zip · 1,204 items · 4.8 GB uncompressed · 1.2 GB compressed

╭───────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────────┬────────╮
│ Path                          │ Uncompressed  │  Compressed │  Ratio │
├───────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────┼────────╤
│ documents/                    │       —       │      —      │   0%   │
│ documents/report.pdf          │      2.1 MB   │   612 KB    │  29%   │
│ documents/notes.txt           │      14.0 KB  │   4.1 KB    │  29%   │
╰───────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────────┴────────╯

Both sizes are reported: the uncompressed size (what the archive would occupy once extracted) and the compressed size (what it occupies now). The ratio says how well the archive compresses.

Browsing a folder inside the archive

diskgoup archives show ~/Downloads/backups-2024.zip --prefix documents/

Parent archive folder: /

Previewing a file

diskgoup archives preview ~/Downloads/backups-2024.zip documents/notes.txt

The preview is the first 64 KiB of the file, decoded as UTF-8. Nothing is extracted to read it.

Partial preview: showing the first 64 KiB.

Some things cannot be previewed as text:

Case	What happens
Binary content	`Binary or encrypted content cannot be previewed as text.`
Encrypted entry	`Binary or encrypted content cannot be previewed as text.`
Empty file	`(Empty file)`
Entry not in the archive	`Entry not found in archive.`

Binary content is detected by a NUL byte in the first 4 KiB.

The rules

The browser is read-only. A sample archive is never extracted and never run.
Text previews are limited to 64 KiB.
HTML is shown as plain text too.
Both the uncompressed and the compressed size are reported.
Entries with invalid names are skipped, and the listing is marked partial:

invalid names skipped; listing is partial.

JSON output

diskgoup --json archives show ~/Downloads/backups-2024.zip

{
  "path": "/Users/you/Downloads/backups-2024.zip",
  "items": 1204,
  "uncompressed": 5153960755,
  "compressed": 1288490188,
  "partial": false,
  "error": null,
  "entries": [
    {
      "name": "documents/report.pdf",
      "is_dir": false,
      "size": 2202009,
      "compressed": 626688,
      "ratio": 0.2846,
      "encrypted": false
    }
  ]
}