Zstd: [question] why the zstd don't preserve original file name and modification date?

[stokito]

Is any reason why this wasn't added? Or maybe there is some plans to implement this?

[gyscos]

zstd itself only compresses a stream of bytes - the file content. To preserve metadata (among other things), something like tar is a great solution (even for a single file).

[stokito]

yes, we can use tar but then to get an original file name and the file permissions we'll need to decompress the archive.tar.zst to archive.tar file.
I added the zstd support to engrampa archive manager but we can't show a real archive content to the user because information about file name is just absent.
gzip and lzop tools optionally can add the meta information so why not to support this in zstd?

[gyscos]

Note that you can directly extract a .tar.zst by piping zstd and tar, without the need for intermediate file:

$ tar cf - my_file | zstd > my_file.tar.zst
$ zstdcat my_file.tar.zst | tar xf -

[stokito]

Yes, but the problem is that to get a real file name, it's perms and modification date we should decompress the whole file.

[gyscos]

Tar can read metadata and stop the reader, which will stop zstd after decoding the very beginning of the file:

$ zstdcat my_file.tar.zst | tar tvf -

[terrelln]

Zstd does attempt to preserve permissions and modification date, starting with zstd version 1.1.2, released in December 2016. However, it isn't enabled on all platforms.

If the latest zstd version isn't preserving file permissions for you, please tell us about your platform, and how you're invoking zstd, so we can help debug the issue.

[stokito]

Hi @terrelln
Is any way to see those permissions/date without extracting an archive?
On my Ubuntu 18.10 I have zstd v1.3.5 but zstd -lv doesn't shows this information:

$ zstd -lv file.txt.zst 
*** zstd command line interface 64-bits v1.3.7, by Yann Collet ***
file.txt.zst 
# Zstandard Frames: 1
Window Size: 1024.00 KB (1048576 B)
Compressed Size: 687.80 KB (704307 B)
Decompressed Size: 3373.43 KB (3454395 B)
Ratio: 4.9047

[terrelln]

@stokito zstd doesn't store the permissions in the format, we simply copy the permissions and modification times from file.txt to file.txt.zst, and from file.txt.zst to file.txt. This is the same way that gzip works.

If you want to store the permissions in the format, you'll have to use a tool like tar.

[mgorny]

Storing the original filename is not a feature but a design hack that shouldn't be copied. The only reason gzip does that is because it dates back to DOS times with 8.3 names. There you couldn't just append .gz to the existing filename, so you had to do a bigger rename and store the original name somewhere. On modern systems, you can safely append .zst and strip it when decompressing, so there's no need for such ugly hacks anymore.