Re: [WWdevel] File Manager and archives

[Davide P.C. <dp...@un...>]

> I think this is just the right solution.  The desire to upload or 
> download many set definition files or a whole directory of privately 
> written problems is one that probably occurs at the beginning and end 
> of each semester.

That seemed to be my impression.  I'm not sure if there are any 
security issues to consider.  If the tar file had absolute file names 
(rather than relative path names) it might be possible to write to 
directories outside the course tree.  I'll have to look into the 
options for tar to see if files could be forced to unpack into a given 
directory (I assume this is possible).  At the least, the table of 
contents could be looked at to see if it contains absolute paths, and 
an error reported.

> So the idea would be: The user is responsible for gzip and tar before 
> upload and after download.  The FileManager takes care of it 
> automatically on the server?

Well, I hadn't really thought about the details, but the archive COULD 
be unpacked automatically.  I suppose there could be another checkbox 
in the upload section that controlled whether archives were unpacked 
and deleted automatically.  Of course, we'll run into Arnie's issue of 
what to do with files that already exist.  :-)  I assume that they 
would be overwritten silently, just as tar does now.

Davide