LinuxBIOS Archiver: lar
-----------------------

Table of Contents
  - Introduction
  - Usage
  - Archive format
  - TODO
  - ChangeLog


Introduction
------------

This is a simple archiver, similar to cpio, ar or tar.

Design goals were
  - minimum overhead
  - maximum fault tolerance
  - simplicity

For a usage example see example.c.

For questions contact Stefan Reinauer <stepan@coresystems.de>.


Usage
-----

Create archive archive.lar containing files file1 ... fileN

  $ lar c archive.lar file1 ... fileN

Extract files from archive.lar

  $ lar x archive.lar [file1 ... fileN]

List files in archive:

  $ lar l archive.lar


Archive format
--------------

The rough format is:

 |--------------|
 |  header      |
 |--------------|
 |  data        |
 |--------------|
 |  header      |
 |--------------|
 |  data        |
 |--------------|
  ...

Headers have to be 16 byte aligned.

 |--------------------|
 |  magic (8byte)     |
 |--------------------|
 |  length (4byte)    |
 |--------------------|
 |  checksum (4byte)  |
 |--------------------|
 | offset to blob (4b)|
 |--------------------|
 | "path name"        | <-- null terminated, aligned to 16b
 |--------------------|
 | blob (aligned 16b) |
 |--------------------|


TODO
----

  - Reading flash layouts
  - This does not enforce any alignment yet
  - Alignment enforcing will be optional


License
-------

This program is licensed under the terms of the GPL, version 2.


ChangeLog
---------

2006/10/9
  - Initial version