Centar

Simple public domain .tar reader/writer.

Centar is a really simple to use single-file library for reading and writing .tar files.

Library

Reading

Tar tar;
CENTAR_BOOL success = ctar_parse("path/to/file.tar", &tar);

It will return 0 on failure and 1 on success. ctar_parse() will parse all the file headers in the file and store them in a linked list.

You can enumerate over all the headers like so:

for (TarHeader* header = tar.header; header != NULL; header = header->next) {
   ...
}

After you're done using the tar archive, you can free it with ctar_free(&tar) To read data you can either use ctar_read(), which will allocate a block of memory using CENTAR_MALLOC and reads the data into it.

You can also use ctar_read_into() to read the data into a block of memory, make sure the block of memory is large enough to store the data.

To find a header, you can use ctar_find(), and to rename a file you can use ctar_rename().

Writing

To write a tar file you can do this:

FILE* out = ctar_begin_write("path/to/file.tar");

const char* some_data = "This is some text file that we're gonna write.";
ctar_write(out, "hello.txt", some_data, strlen(some_data));
ctar_end_write(out);

If you want to export an existing Tar variable, you can use ctar_export(&tar, "path/to/file.tar");.

One thing to note is that you shouldn't export a tar file to the tar file that you opened. ctar_export() will read the original archive and then read each file into memory and write it to the new file.

Command-Line Tool

In the example programs there is a simple command-line tool.

Like the library it should be simple to use. (unlike the Linux tar command)

Option	Description	Arguments
-h --help	Shows the help	-
-c --create	Creates a new archive	files...
-a --add	Adds a file to the archive	files...
-r --rename	Renames a file	file, new name
-d --delete	Deletes a file	files...
-l --list	Lists all files	-
-e --extract	Extracts files	files...