Re^4: Top 10 reasons to start using ack

[petdance]

I could see using "foo.gz" as the filename for a standalone file, using your streaming method.

For tarballs, though, I would have to extract to a temporary directory and delve through that, and that means write privileges that I don't want to assume.

[diotalevi]

You can't extract a file at a time out to a temporary directory using File::Temp? Or even better - don't even write it back to disk.

[petdance]

Heck, your program doesn't even handle tarballs anyway! :-)

The other thing is that this stops ack from being pure Perl and totally cross-platform.

[diotalevi]

I don't think that's a reason to omit the feature, it just needs some care and maybe not everyone can use the feature. There's plenty of goodness available by reading from a "gunzip -c" stream and only slightly less by reading from Archive::Tar::Streamed. Sometime within the last month I wrote an iterator to read file by file from a tarball using that module but without any hoops to jump through. It's all easy.