Comment by thaumasiotes
7 hours ago
> It effectively reduces the I/O, while unlike TAR, allowing direct random to the files without "extracting" them or seeking through the entire file
How do you access a particular file without seeking through the entire file? You can't know where anything is without first seeking through the whole file.
You look at the end of the file which tells you where the central directory is. The directory tells you where individual files are.
At the end of the ZIP file, there's a central directory of all files contained in that archive. Read the last block, seek to the block containing the file you want to access, done