What is the best library to work with archives [closed]

Question

I wonder, what library you would choose for the following: I need to be able to combine a bunch of files and folders (a tree of filesystem structure) into one file - archive, thus having one composite file.

• the library must be cross-platform: Windows 7 and Linux
• it must provide access to the content and ability to extract only one file (e.g. if I have an archive of data folder and if I need only data/subdata/file, only it should be extracted)
• it must have C++ (preferably) or C API
• I am not particularly keen on archiving, but it would be desirable, since I will be storing mostly text files and they compress well...

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

zlib in combination with Boost Iostreams is a great combination. This does not do file level extraction though.

EDIT: Some other options I found via another SO question include:

• Zipios++
• QuaZIP - Requires QT, may not build on Windows correctly

EDIT2:

• Minizip (usually included with zlib) will do the trick too - probably the most lightweight and commonly used solution.

Answer 2

Consider libarchive.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libarchive.htm