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> The format was developed in 1989, at which time find(1) and grep(1) and command lines pipes had been around for at least 10 years (more, depending on how you
by throw0101a 5y ago
> The format was developed in 1989, at which time find(1) and grep(1) and command lines pipes had been around for at least 10 years (more, depending on how you measure it).
PKZIP, which originated the Zip format, was developed on MS-DOS, which did not have find(1) and grep(1), nor did it have pipes (IIRC):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKZIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKZIP
It was a third-party who created utilities that ran under Unix-y systems:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Info-ZIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Info-ZIP
Unix had its own file archive formats at the time, but it seems that folks on the PC side of things either didn't know about them, or didn't care for them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_(Unix)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpio
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoGP said "computing was different back then", not "Zip was developed on a toy operating system that lacked these sorts of facilities". I did note that likely what mattered the most was that pkzip's creators didn't care about (or maybe even know about) Unix.
- pcwalton 5y ago> PKZIP, which originated the Zip format, was developed on MS-DOS, which did not have find(1) and grep(1), nor did it have pipes (IIRC): COMMAND.COM supported find(1) in the form of DIR /S and grep(1) in the form of FIND. It also supported Unix-like pipe syntax, though because DOS wasn't multitasking it was implemented under the hood by redirecting to a temporary file and running the programs sequentially.