I am writing a small Tkinter utility to control archive files in multiple formats (mainly for my own amusement and education). Basically it presents the user with two adjacent listboxes, one with the contents of the target directory and one with the contents of the archive. By clicking buttons labelled '<' and '>' the user can copy files to and from the archive. The actual archiving functionality derives from the modules zipfile and tarfile.
It all seems to be working fine, but I have two residual queries. Firstly for the sake of completeness I would like to include .rar archives, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent rarfile module. I use both Windows and Linux on various machines, so need a cross platform solution which does not depend on external modules. The only one I have found is at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rarfile/1.0, but it seems this does rely on an external module. Is there anything out there? Secondly, I found that when extracting zip files, the date stamps were all reset to the date/time of extraction, whereas for tar files they retained their original values. This second behaviour seems more logical, and I have simulated it for the zipfiles by using zipfile.getinfo to read the original date then os.utime to rewrite it. It seems rather messy - have I missed something simple like a flag setting within zipfile? Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list