I havan't been following this thread closely, but the following statement caught my eye:
> Even utilities like winzip and 7zip will extract file to the user's tmp > dir before copying or moving them into the final location. Really? I can't speak for those programs, but I can say that Info-ZIP UnZip definitely does not use "the user's tmp dir" when extracting an archive member. Extraction is done directly to the actual destination directory. When creating an archive, Info-ZIP Zip does create a temporary archive file, but it normally uses the actual destination directory for this temporary archive file, and then renames it to the user-specified name if it's created successfully. With Zip, a user can use the -b/--temp-path option to specify explicitly a different temporary archive directory, and then Zip will do a copy+delete operation if a rename operation fails. However, this is useful only if the archive destination is something like a WORM drive, where a rename operation is not available. In general, a rename operation won't work between devices, and copy+delete is much slower than rename, so using a different directory for the temporary archive is generally a bad idea. In some cases, on some operating systems (VMS, for example), UnZip can pre-allocate disk space when extracting an archive member. It's not generally done, because the methods used tend to be OS-specific. I'll let you decide what Wget should be doing, but I'd be careful about faulty analogies to other programs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Steven M. Schweda sms@antinode-info 382 South Warwick Street (+1) 651-699-9818 Saint Paul MN 55105-2547
