Apple Archive

Overview

Apple Archive provides fast compression that includes file attributes, such as, ownership, permissions, flags, times, extended attributes, and error correction. Apple Archive offers these features:

• Multithreaded processing that uses all cores, is energy efficient, and yields faster results

• An ability to transport files and their attributes and use Apple File System (APFS) features when they’re available, for example, filesystem compression, full clones, and sparse files

• Flexible encoding formats, so you can use archives, for example, for error correction, digests, manifests, and external data storage

• API support for in-memory archive processing, streaming access, random access, and back-to-back archive and extraction

Topics

Apple Archive essentials

• Compressing single files
• Decompressing single files
• Compressing file system directories
• Decompressing and extracting an archived directory
• Compressing and saving a string to the file system
• Decompressing and parsing an archived string

Apple Encrypted Archive essentials

• Encrypting and Decrypting a String
• Encrypting and Decrypting a Single File
• Encrypting and Decrypting Directories
• ArchiveEncryptionContext

Apple Archive headers

• ArchiveHeader

Apple Archive streams

• ArchiveStreamProtocol
• ArchiveStream
• ArchiveByteStreamProtocol
• ArchiveByteStream

Apple Archive errors

• ArchiveError

Constants

• APPLE_ARCHIVE_API_VERSION

Reference

• Apple Archive structures

See Also

Related Documentation

• About Apple File System