looking for a one-file filesystem or archiving file format [closed]

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I'm looking for some filesystem, or archiving file format, with transparent compressing/decompressing support, and can be opened in windows (as a file) by some tool(like winrar or 7-zip), and have some easy to use c interfaces

As far as I've found, zip fileformat is the closest, transparent decompressing, simple c interface (Minizip), but zip format is not suited for file lookup by filename. the UDF filesystem (in iso format) may be bettar at filename lookup (it's a guess, I haven't look very deep), but I haven't found a c interface

Yet I think there must be a more obvious and simpler approach than zip and iso, so, is there?

UPDATE

I have failed to find such a filesystem, especially transparent decompressing. yet there are good ones, like whefs, but without transparent decompressing. and none filesystem approaches, namely DBM(CDB, gdbm, etc)

Answer 1

If you need archiving (i.e. sequential compressing and decompression, with no modifications), then ZIP is a standard and probably there's nothing close to ZIP in popularity. However ZIP is not effective when you manipulate files in it (i.e. when you need a virtual file system). In the latter case you can use CodeBase File System, Solid File System (our product) or one of similar products.

Answer 2

Zip is the de facto standard solution for compression and archiving. Judging by the following diagram of the format (from Wikipedia), lookup by name occurs in the "central directory" and should not involve a scan through the entire file.

Answer 3

zziplib (and probably others) allows you to read the directory inside a zip file like it were a normal filesystem directory.